TY - JOUR AU - Chaloupka, Frank J AU - Grossman, Michael AU - Tauras, John A TI - The Demand for Cocaine and Marijuana by Youth JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 6411 PY - 1998 Y2 - February 1998 DO - 10.3386/w6411 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6411 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6411.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Frank J. Chaloupka IV University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Economics (m/c 144) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 601 S. Morgan Street, Room 713 Chicago, IL 60607-7121 Tel: 312/413-2287 Fax: 312/996-3344;630/801-8870 E-Mail: fjc@uic.edu Michael Grossman National Bureau of Economic Research 5 Hanover Square, 16th Floor, Suite 1602 New York, NY 10004-2630 Tel: (646) 783-4407 E-Mail: mgrossman@gc.cuny.edu John A. Tauras University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Economics (m/c 144) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 601 S. Morgan Street, Room 707 Chicago, IL 60607 Tel: 312/413-3289 Fax: 312/996-3344 E-Mail: tauras@uic.edu M1 - published as Frank J. Chaloupka, Michael Grossman, John A. Tauras. "The Demand for Cocaine and Marijuana by Youth," in Frank J. Chaloupka, Michael Grossman, Warren K. Bickel and Henry Saffer, editors, "The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse: An Integration of Econometric and Behavioral Economic Research" University of Chicago Press (1999) AB - In recent years, the debate over the costs and benefits of legalizing the use of currently illicit drugs has been revived. This paper attempts to inform this debate by providing some evidence on the effects of illicit drug prices and legal sanctions for drug possession and sale on youth drug use. Data on cocaine and marijuana use by high school seniors are taken from the 1982 and 1989 Monitoring the Future surveys. Site-specific data on cocaine prices and legal sanctions for the possession and sale, manufacture or distribution of cocaine and marijuana are added to the survey data. The results indicate that youth cocaine demand is sensitive to price, with average past year and past month cocaine demand elasticities of -1.28 and -1.43, respectively. In addition, the estimates suggest that increased sanctions for the possession of cocaine and marijuana have a negative and statistically significant impact on youth cocaine and marijuana use. However, the magnitude of these estimates implies that very large increases in the monetary fines that can be imposed for first offense possession would be necessary to achieve meaningful reductions in use. Finally, sanctions for the sale, manufacture or distribution of cocaine and marijuana were found to have little impact on youth cocaine and marijuana use. ER -