A slightly misleading article was posted on NORML that states how many cannabis-related studies have been published in 2025 compared to the years before.
The author begins by stating that more than 4,000 scientific papers were published in 2025, which is the 5th consecutive year that this has been the case. These numbers were found by searching a keyword into PubMed and sorting by year.
The issue with this is that PubMed’s results are very broad, and include many things that are not studies. When filtering out results like books, newspaper articles, lectures, and legislation, the number reduces to under 1,000. Still a very large amount of studies in one year and one topic, but nowhere near the number touted.
It’s still heartening to see that the number of studies isn’t slowing much. In 2021, this number was sitting at 1,063 results, and 974 in 2022. NORML accurately claims that “more than 70 percent of all peer-reviewed scientific papers about marijuana have been published in the past ten years, and over 90 percent of this literature has been published since 2002.”
We’re still in the stage of gleaning as much information about the effect cannabis can have on our bodies as we can, and studies are coming out left and right that tend to contradict each other.
If you’d like to be extremely intellectually stimulate, feel free the peruse the 2025 results at PubMed here.
