About

Anne Boustead is an Associate Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on legal and policy issues related to electronic surveillance, privacy, policing, and drug policy. She is particularly interested in empirically studying law enforcement surveillance and evaluating the impact of policies regulating this surveillance. Dr. Boustead holds a Ph.D. from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where her dissertation examined the interplay between commercial data collection and law enforcement surveillance. During her doctoral studies, she worked as an assistant policy analyst at RAND, contributing to projects related to electronic surveillance, cybersecurity, and drug policy. She also earned a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Geography
• Data science
• Internet privacy
• Virology
• Environmental health
• Public administration
• Gerontology
• Engineering ethics
• Demography

Selected publications

• Associations between Recreational Cannabis Legislation and Driving under the Influence of Alcohol and Other Substances in the US

  Drug and Alcohol Dependence · 2025-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Racial and Ethnic Differences in Suicide Mortality Among Youth Aged 12–25 Years Following Medical and Recreational Cannabis Legalization in the U.S.

  American Journal of Preventive Medicine · 2025-10-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The relationship of medical and recreational cannabis laws with opioid misuse and opioid use disorder in the USA: Does it depend on prior history of cannabis use?

  International Journal of Drug Policy · 2025-01-09 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Wider availability of cannabis through medical and recreational legalization (MCL alone and RCL+MCL) has been hypothesized to contribute to reductions in opioid use, misuse, and related harms. We examined whether state adoption of cannabis laws was associated with changes in opioid outcomes overall and stratified by cannabis use. METHODS: Using National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data from 2015 to 2019, we estimated cannabis law associations with opioid (prescription opioid misuse and/or heroin use) misuse and use disorder. All logistic regression models (overall models and models stratified by cannabis use), included year and state fixed effects, individual level covariates, and opioid-related state policies. Stratified analyses were restricted to individuals who reported lifetime cannabis use prior to law adoption to reduce potential for collider bias. Estimates accounted for multiple comparisons using false discovery rate (FDR) corrections and sensitivity to unmeasured confounding using e-values. RESULTS: Overall, MCL and RCL adoption were not associated with changes in the odds of any opioid outcome. After restricting to respondents reporting past-year cannabis use, we observed decreased odds of past year opioid misuse (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 0.57 [95 % confidence interval [CI]: 0.38, 0.85]; FDR p-value: 0.07), among individuals in states with MCL compared to those in states without cannabis laws. RCLs were not associated with changes in the odds of any opioid outcome beyond MCL adoption. CONCLUSION: Comparing individuals in MCL alone states to those in states without such laws, we found an inconsistent pattern of decreased odds of opioid outcomes, which were more pronounced among people reporting cannabis use. The pattern did not hold for individuals in RCL states. In line with a substitution-oriented perspective, findings suggests that MCLs may be associated with reductions in opioid use among people using cannabis but additional work to replicate and expand on these findings is needed.

  PublisherDOI

• Associations between cannabis policies and state-level specialty cannabis use disorder treatment in the United States, 2004–2019

  Drug and Alcohol Dependence · 2024-02-02 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Recreational Cannabis Legislation and Binge Drinking in U.S. Adolescents and Adults Between 2008-2019

  Drug and Alcohol Dependence · 2024-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Relationship Between Medical and Recreational Cannabis Legalization With Opioid Misuse Among Individuals Reporting Medically Recommended Cannabis Use

  Drug and Alcohol Dependence · 2024-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The association between state cannabis policies and cannabis use among adults and youth, United States, 2002–2019

  Addiction · 2024-09-19 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access

  AIMS: To measure the association between state cannabis policies and use among adults and youth in the United States from 2002 to 2019, given rapid policy liberalization and complex state cannabis policy environments. DESIGN: Repeated cross-sectional time series analysis. Three sets of models assessed the linear association between the Cannabis Policy Scale (CPS), an aggregate measure of 17 state cannabis policy areas that weights each policy by its efficacy and implementation rating, and prevalence of cannabis use. The first included year and state fixed effects; the second added state-level controls; the third replaced state fixed effects with state random effects. Standard errors were clustered at the state level in all models. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: United States. MEASUREMENTS: Past-month prevalence of cannabis use is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health Small Area Estimates, a nationally and state-representative cross-sectional survey of household population ages 12 and older for years 2002-2003 to 2018-2019. Exposure data include the CPS. FINDINGS: A 10 percentage-point increase in the CPS (i.e. greater cannabis policy restrictiveness) was associated with lower past-month use prevalence by 0.81 (95% confidence interval [CI] = -1.05 to -0.56) to 0.97 (95% CI = -1.19 to -0.75) percentage-points for the population ages 12 years and older. When models were stratified by age, a 10 percentage-point increase in the CPS was associated with a 0.87 (95% CI = -1.13 to -0.61) to 1.04 percentage-point (95% CI = -1.03 to -0.84) reduction in past-month use prevalence for adults ages 18 years and older, and a 0.17 (95% CI = -0.24 to -0.09) to 0.21 percentage-point (95% CI = -0.35 to -0.07) reduction for youth ages 12-17 years. CONCLUSIONS: More restrictive US cannabis policies appear to be associated with reduced cannabis use for both adults and youth.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adult use cannabis legalization and cannabis use disorder treatment in California, 2010–2021

  Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment · 2024-03-15 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  INTRODUCTION: Many nations and jurisdictions have legalized non-medical adult use of cannabis, or are considering doing so. This paper contributes to knowledge of adult use legalization's associations with cannabis use disorder (CUD) treatment utilization. METHODS: This study collected data from a dataset of all publicly funded substance use disorder treatment delivered in California from 2010 to 2021 (1,460,066 episodes). A logistic regression model estimates adult use legalization's impacts on CUD treatment utilization using an individual-level pre-post time series model, including individual and county-level characteristics and county and year-fixed effects. RESULTS: Adult use legalization was associated with a significant decrease in the probability of admission to CUD treatment (average marginal effect (AME): -0.005, 95 % CI: -0.009, 0.000). Adult use legalization was also associated with a decrease in the probability of admission to CUD treatment for males (AME: -0.025, 95 % CI: -0.027, -0.023) Medi-Cal beneficiaries (AME: -0.025, 95 % CI: -0.027, -0.023) adults ages 21+ (AME: -0.011, 95 % CI: -0.014, -0.009) and Whites (AME: -0.012, 95 % CI: -0.015, -0.010), and an increase in the probability of admission to CUD treatment for patients referred from the criminal justice system (AME: 0.017, 95 % CI: 0.015, 0.020) and Blacks (AME: 0.004, 95 % CI: 0.000, 0.007) and Hispanics (AME: 0.009, 95 % CI: 0.006, 0.011). CONCLUSIONS: Adult use legalization is associated with declining CUD treatment admissions, even though cannabis-related problems are becoming more prevalent. Policies and practices that protect public health, and engage people with CUD in treatment are needed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Juror interpretations of metadata and content information: implications for the going dark debate

  Journal of Cybersecurity · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The rise of consumer encryption has led to a fierce debate over whether the loss of potential evidence due to encryption will be offset by the increase in evidence available from electronic metadata. One major question raised by this debate is how jurors will interpret and value metadata as opposed to content information. Though there are plausible arguments in favor of the persuasive power of each type of evidence, to date no empirical study has examined how ordinary people, potential jurors, view each of these sorts of evidence. We address this issue through a series of survey experiments that present respondents with hypothetical criminal trials, randomly assigning them to descriptions featuring either metadata or content information. These studies show that the relative power of content and metadata information is highly contextual. Content information and metadata can be equally useful when conveying logically equivalent information. However, content information may be more persuasive where the defendant’s state of mind is critical, while metadata can more convincingly establish a pattern of behavior. This suggests that the rise of encryption will have a heterogeneous effect on criminal cases, with the direction of the effect depending on the facts that the prosecution must prove.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effect of the Drug Medi-Cal Organized Delivery System 1115 Demonstration Waiver on Substance Use Disorder Treatment Access: Evidence from California

  Drug and Alcohol Dependence · 2023-03-22 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: In August 2015, the California Department of Health Care Services created the Drug Medi-Cal Organized Delivery System 1115 demonstration waiver (DMC-ODS waiver) to improve service delivery to Medi-Cal-eligible individuals with a substance use disorder (SUD). We examine if implementing the DMC-ODS waiver across California counties improved patient access to SUD treatment services. METHODS: We use administrative data from 2016 to 2020 from a reporting system for all publicly-funded SUD treatment services delivered in California and employ difference-in-differences and event study empirical strategies exploiting the differential timing of DMC-ODS waiver adoption across counties. RESULTS: Event study analyses show that eleven or more months after the introduction of the DMC-ODS waiver, the number of unique patient admissions significantly increase by nearly 20%. Residential treatment admissions significantly increase by roughly 25% in all months post-waiver introduction. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides valuable information for policymakers about implementing 1115 waivers, and the important public health implications. California's DMC-ODS waiver has demonstrated that 1115 waivers similar to it can likely increase access to SUD treatment.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Deborah S. Hasin

  Columbia University

  11 shared

• Scott J. Shackelford

  6 shared

• Sílvia S. Martins

  Columbia University

  6 shared

• Mary A. Fristad

  6 shared

• Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

  University of Southern California

  6 shared

• Emilie Bruzelius

  Columbia University

  5 shared

• Cynthia A. Fontanella

  The Ohio State University

  5 shared

• Natalie S. Levy

  Aetion (United States)

  5 shared