Science & Health
The U.S. Now Has Almost 4 Million Registered Medical Marijuana Patients And 35,000 Doctors Approved To Recommend It, New Research Shows
There are nearly 4 million patients registered to use medical marijuana under state laws in the U.S., as well as at least 35,000 doctors and clinicians approved to recommend it and nearly 110,000 caregivers authorized to assist patients in growing and obtaining cannabis products, according to a pair of new studies published by the American College of Physicians.
The number of Americans who are registered under state medical marijuana programs more than quintupled from about 747,000 in 2016 to approximately 3.9 million in 2024—though patient registration has “flattened since 2022, likely influenced by the growing number of jurisdictions with recreational cannabis laws,” one of the papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine said.
The researchers with the University of Michigan said that declining growth in medical marijuana patient registrations in recent years is likely tied to many states enacting broader adult-use legalization laws.
“Decreased patient enrollment in recreational jurisdictions may result from patients opting out due to licensing fees or inconvenience, privacy concerns, and their use of recreational products for medical purposes without licensure,” they said.
Chronic pain was the most common qualifying condition for state-registered medical marijuana patients, accounting for 65 percent of all patient-reported conditions, followed by PTSD (29 percent) and anxiety (17 percent).
The “widespread use” of medical cannabis “reflects the importance of continued rigorous clinical investigations of cannabis products in these conditions and more broadly to better understand possible risks and benefits,” the authors said.
A separate paper from the same research team found that the number of clinicians authorized to recommend medical marijuana to patients grew from nearly 31,000 in 2020 to almost 36,000 in 2024.
Notably, states with only medical cannabis had “substantially lower” rates of clinicians authorized to recommend it than states that also have recreational marijuana legalization laws, which the researchers said “may reflect their longer-standing medical cannabis programs, which may foster greater clinical acceptance of cannabis authorization.”
They also conducted what they said is the first-ever analysis of the number of caregivers who are authorized under state laws to assist medical cannabis patients in growing, obtaining and using their medicine, finding that there were nearly 11,000 such approved caregivers in 2024.
“There were higher caregiver rates in recreational jurisdictions compared with medical-only jurisdictions and higher caregiver rates in jurisdictions allowing home cultivation compared with those that did not,” the study said.
“Overall, there were approximately 3-fold higher number and 4-fold higher rate of caregivers per patient than authorizing clinicians,” the study said. “This may reflect caregivers’ direct involvement in medical cannabis care, as they can purchase, grow, and produce cannabis for patients—services that authorized clinicians cannot legally provide.”
For both studies, researchers analyzed medical cannabis data using publicly available reports, registry websites, data requests and communications with regulators overseeing state marijuana programs.
They cautioned that the research has some limitations, including the inconsistency with which state officials track and report data about their respective medical cannabis programs.
