Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation and a Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She serves as Director of RAND’s BING Center for Health Economics and is co-director of the RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center.

Her research at RAND over the last 20 years has largely focused on issues related to illegal or imperfect markets (health care markets, insurance markets, and illicit drug markets): measurement of the size of these markets, the impact they have on behaviour, and the effectiveness of policy interventions at targeting behaviour within these markets.

She was the lead investigator of several NIH studies examining the impact of marijuana liberalization policies (decriminalization, medicalization and legalization ) on use and public health as well as their impact on the use of other substances (alcohol, opioids. She has also been actively engaged in evaluating the impact of recent policies to expand treatment, particularly for opioid use, in the United States.

Dr. Pacula is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a regular scientific reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and a number of foundations and journals. She has been part of the research teams providing guidance to Washington State, Vermont and Canada on their legalization initiatives, focusing on public health aspects of these laws. Currently she serves as an advisor to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program, the NIDA- funded Monitoring the Future Survey project, and the NIAAA APIS system.

She is the Vice President of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP), and sits on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Drug Policy and the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. She is also an Assistant Editor for the international drug journal, Addiction.