CA NORML Medical Marijuana Information

Cal. NORML Estimates Over 300,000 Medical Marijuana Patients in California

1.95 Million Californians admit to monthly recreational use

California NORML estimates that some 300,000 Californians are legal medical marijuana patients as of 2007. An estimate by Fred Gardner published in O'Shaughnessy's, Winter/Spring 2007, puts the number at 350,000, based on a survey of physicians.

An informal survey of patient's groups by California NORML puts the numbers between 275,000 and 350,000. This corresponds to some 1% of California's entire adult population. (The state of Oregon, which unlike California has mandatory patient registration, reports 20,842 patients as of Jan 1, 2009; but qualification rules are more restrictive in Oregon.)

According to the US Dept of HHS 2007 survey, some 1.95 million Californians admit to having used marijuana in the past month. Hence some 85% of all California marijuana users are non-medical. Medical cannabis usage in California continues to grow rapidly, causing California NORML to raise its estimate of the number of legal patients in California to over 150,000 as of November 2005, up from 75,000 in January 2004.

See earlier estimates