Science & Health
Researchers Published More Than 4,000 Studies On Marijuana This Year As Trump Continues To Weigh Rescheduling
For the fifth year in a row, researchers worldwide published more than 4,000 scientific papers related to marijuana in 2025, according to a new analysis by the advocacy group NORML.
All told, since the beginning of 2015, there have been more than 37,000 published papers about cannabis, the group said, largely reflecting “researchers’ newfound focus on marijuana’s therapeutic activities as well as investigations into the real-world effects of legalization laws.”
“Despite the perception that marijuana has yet to be subject to adequate scientific scrutiny, scientists’ interest in studying cannabis has increased exponentially in the past decade, as has our understanding of the plant, its active constituents, their mechanisms of action, and their effects on both the user and upon society,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said in a press release.
“It is time for politicians and others to stop assessing cannabis through the lens of ‘what we don’t know’ and instead start engaging in evidence-based discussions about marijuana and marijuana reform policies that are indicative of all that we do know,” he said.
To tally the papers, NORML conducted a keyword search of the National Library of Medicine’s resource PubMed.gov. In total, the advocacy group said on Wednesday, PubMed now cites “over 57,000 scientific papers on marijuana dating back to the year 1840.”
Of those, more than 70 percent were published in the past decade, NORML found. More than 90 percent, the group said, were published since 2002.
Published papers on cannabis are up compared to the trailing 10-year period analyzed last year, during which 32,000 publications came out. But the one-year record from 2022 appears to still be standing. More than 4,300 papers on cannabis were published that year.
Among the papers published in the past year are reports on declining youth cannabis use in Canada post-legalization, lower rates of opioid prescribing in medical marijuana states, the therapeutic potential of cannabis to treat anxiety and depression, increased tourism benefits for jurisdictions that have enacted legalization and more.
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Several other studies from 2025 have indicated that marijuana and its components can effectively mitigate alcohol use disorders and curb cravings. Researchers also found this year that more Americans use cannabis than smoke cigarettes amid shifting perceptions of harm of the two substances.
Also this year, scientists made strides in identifying new cannabinoids in the marijuana plant such as cannabielsoxa.
There have been hopes among the scientific community that a proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances (CSA) could ease research barriers enabling them to further explore the risks and benefits of cannabis. But while President Donald Trump said in August that a decision on that reform would come within weeks, it hasn’t materialized yet.
