Perinatal Marijuana Use and the Developing Child

Increasing public attention has recently been paid to the opioid epidemic and attendant effects on prenatally exposed infants and children.¹ Current literature has emerged proposing marijuana as a safe alternative to opioids in addressing pain² and cannabis legalization as a way to decrease opioid fatalities.³ As a result, perceptions of cannabis safety have increased, and the prevalence of marijuana use among pregnant women has expanded; past-month cannabis use among pregnant US women increased from 2.4% to 3.9% between 2002 and 2014.⁴ Further, cannabis potency has been substantially increasing over the past 4 decades in the United States, and will likely continue to do so as extraction procedures of active components improve.