In 1994, Melanie Dreher published a study showing that cannabis-exposed babies thrived. The medical establishment went silent. Thirty years later, she’s still trying to finish the work — and pregnant women are still being jailed.
More than 25 years ago, a landmark study quietly challenged one of modern medicine’s most deeply rooted assumptions: Cannabis use during pregnancy is inherently harmful. The findings were striking. The response was silence. And today, while cannabis laws liberalize across much of the world, pregnant women and mothers remain among the most vulnerable to punishment and stigma.
“It’s very disappointing,” says Melanie Dreher, the nurse-anthropologist and public health scholar who worked on the original study. “There are so many women in this country who could benefit from cannabis therapy during and post-pregnancy. Instead, they are reported to the authorities, often jailed and even separated from their newborns, depriving them of breast milk.”
She cited one such case of a woman whose hair tested positive for cannabis during labor and delivery in a Michigan hospital. “The infant was immediately placed into foster care and the parents left the hospital without their newborn,” she says. “Friends recommended me and I contacted the State Attorney’s office to better understand a policy that required the removal of children from their parents. I was told: ‘In Michigan, we believe that there is an inherent danger for children in homes where there is exposure to ‘harmful substances’ and who need to be protected by the state.’”
A Perfect Researcher for the Job
Melanie Dreher’s path into cannabis research was purely accidental. Initially trained as a registered nurse, she was encouraged early in her career to pursue a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Her professors, Dr. Lambros Comitas and Dr. Margaret Mead, invited her to participate in a federally funded comparative study of cannabis in Jamaica, where the plant was widely used by working class men. She demurred with a cordial “Thank you very much, but I don’t think so.” Her professors asked why. Her response: “I’ve never been to Jamaica. I’ve never done ethnographic fieldwork, and I’ve never smoked marijuana.”
Mead’s reply: “You’re perfect.”
“I’ve never been to Jamaica. I’ve never done ethnographic fieldwork, and I’ve never smoked marijuana.”
Melanie Dreher — to which Margaret Mead replied: “You’re perfect.”
Dreher landed in Jamaica, where she soon realized that cannabis is not criminalized or glamorized. It is medicine, nourishment and community. Sugarcane workers take ganja breaks — not coffee breaks — to sustain themselves through grueling labor. Mothers prepare cannabis tea for children to promote health, prevent illness, and improve learning.
One evening, while sitting in the yard of a sugar cane worker who participated in her study, Dreher noticed that he was smoking a spliff while holding his young daughter in his lap. Dreher watched him inhale deeply and exhale the smoke directly into the little girl’s face. Somewhat alarmed, she gently suggested that his daughter may be inhaling the smoke he was producing.
He responded (smiling) that she has asthma and he was curing her with ganja. Within minutes, the child’s breathing eased and regulated. As she dug a little deeper, she stopped studying the men and began her study of the women who use cannabis for health-related purposes and who grow, prepare and sell the plant as medicine.
The Jamaican Pregnancy Study
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, concerns about pregnancy and medication safety were widespread, particularly in the wake of pharmaceuticals prescribed for morning sickness that resulted in birth defects. Jamaican women, by contrast, were managing nausea with cannabis tea, not pills, and reported little to no morning sickness. So Dreher proposed a formal study.
Working with Harvard-affiliated pediatrician Kevin Nugent and drawing on the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale, the team conducted the first systematic study of cannabis use during pregnancy. Thirty women who already used cannabis were matched by age and parity with non-using mothers. All were rural, healthy, and from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.
Babies were assessed at two days, five days, and one month after birth.
The results stunned the researchers. “The babies with the most cannabis exposure did the best,” says Dreher. “Across measures of alertness, motor development, and social engagement.” Still, the team hesitated to publish. At the time, the medical consensus — unsupported by data — was that cannabis exposure was dangerous. But the study was ultimately published, thanks largely to Nugent’s persistence.
Then they waited for backlash.
Nothing happened.
No outrage.
No replication.
No follow-up funding.
No public debate.
“Either nobody read it, or nobody wanted to touch it.”
Melanie Dreher, on the response to the 1994 study
Still Fighting at 82
Now in her eighties and a grandmother of 10, Dreher remains undeterred. Today, she’s trying again to fund a small, modern study on cannabis and pregnancy. “It wouldn’t even cost that much,” she says. “With $100,000, we could do something meaningful.” She has already contributed $25,000 herself.
$100,000
What Dreher says it would cost to conduct a meaningful modern follow-up study on cannabis and pregnancy. She has already contributed $25,000 of her own money. Federal funding has not materialized.
Nevertheless, funding remains elusive. Dreher claims previous NIH proposals scored well scientifically — until legislators intervened after seeing a photo of a healthy Jamaican cannabis mom and her baby girl. It was taken by Dreher and featured in an NIH publication sent to US legislators, accompanied by a caption noting cannabis use and healthy babies. “The lawmakers went nuts,” claims Dreher. “They said they would never fund the follow-up study. Ever. NIH had to comply.”
This is why she’s teaming up with physician Genester Wilson-King, MD FACOG, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, and longtime collaborator Rebekah Hudgins, an anthropologist and epidemiologist whose work focuses on women’s and children’s health and the community systems that shape well-being.
Hudgins explains that the study needs to be revisited since their combination of qualitative and quantitative data provides a rich portrait of the Jamaican households and children. “Surveys and testing alone simply cannot uncover the kind of data needed to understand any social issue,” says Hudgins, “and I think this is especially true with cannabis use.” During her two years in Jamaica, Hudgins conducted ethnographic observations of the 60 children in a case-control study.
Observations covered all waking hours for each child within one week of their 5th birthday. She was with families all day, following children during play, school, church. Wherever they went, “I was there with my notepad,” remembers Hudgins. “These 60 children had been in the study since birth, so they knew Melanie and had met other research assistants who were in the field before me. I believe I lived in Jamaica longer than any of the field researchers, so I got to know the families very well.”
The team also completed the standardized McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities, as well as other standardized tests with each child around their 5th birthday, and collected information about weight and height. The observations around the children’s 5th birthday were the most intensively documented period, but Hudgins stayed in contact with the families throughout her time there. “In fact,” she says, “more than 30 years later, I still occasionally get a call from one of the children or a mother.”
For her part, Dr. Wilson-King — a nationally recognized speaker on women’s health and cannabis — focuses on the plant’s use in gynecology and, where appropriate and responsible, in obstetrics. She serves on the Experts Board of Doctors for Drug Policy Reform and as President of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, where she leads its first female-majority executive board. She has also served as an expert witness in dozens of cases. “I have provided written testimony contributing to the complete dismissal of charges in several of them,” she says. Her approach is evidence-based, patient-centered and openly advocates for women’s rights across all spaces — including testifying before a medical board to support the inclusion of a specific diagnosis for women to qualify for cannabis use.
Observation Summary
In the Jamaican study, children of mothers who use cannabis did not differ from others regarding motor skills, attention, or general behavior. They were more likely to attend school and have multiple trusted adults who cared for them. Further, children exposed to cannabis in utero weighed slightly more and were slightly taller. Overall, the households of cannabis-using families had greater resources to support and care for their children.
“These findings are important,” says Hudgins. “The Jamaican study is the only study of its kind with a predominantly single drug-use population that collected extensive ethnographic data and standardized testing data and found no detrimental effects even within the highest consumption households.”
More research is clearly needed, and the team is interested in continuing to learn about cannabis use from women in this country to help inform social policy and practice and shift the public view of the plant.
New research, same direction. A study published in April 2026 in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research followed more than 11,000 adolescents from age 10 through 14 and found no negative associations between prenatal cannabis exposure and cognitive development once sociodemographic factors were accounted for. “Little evidence emerged for negative effects of low-level prenatal alcohol, cannabis, or combined exposure on adolescents’ cognitive development after accounting for sociodemographic factors,” the researchers concluded. The findings add to a growing body of literature aligned with Dreher’s 1994 results — and reinforce her argument that the silence around that work was never about the science.
Mothers Find the Study Anyway
Decades later, the study lives on. Underground. Pregnant women find it and share it. Cannabis-using mothers quietly pass it through private networks. Calls continue to pour in. Mothers write. Now, some judges listen when Dreher testifies on behalf of women facing incarceration. “I once got recognized by a tech support worker,” Dreher laughs. “She said, ‘We’re not supposed to comment on what’s on your screen, but…are you the one who did that study?’ She told me it was their moms’ group’s bible.”
Still, in medical institutions, skepticism remains entrenched. At a presentation to neurologists and psychiatrists at a major Chicago medical center, Dreher was told cannabis could never be endorsed without double-blind clinical trials. Her response was blunt: “It’s a good thing women don’t need you to prescribe it.”
“It’s a good thing women don’t need you to prescribe it.”
Melanie Dreher, to neurologists and psychiatrists at a major Chicago medical center
The Hypocrisy of Modern Medicine
Physicians, argues Dreher, occupy a comfortable middle ground: unwilling to study or teach cannabis medicine, unwilling to treat patients directly with it and yet happy to charge hundreds of dollars for medical cannabis cards. “They make money without accountability,” she says. “And very few even teach the endocannabinoid system in medical school. That should tell you everything.”
780,000+
Cannabis charges expunged in Illinois since 2019, per the state’s Cannabis Regulation Oversight Office. According to Dreher, pregnant women remain largely excluded from those reforms.
Even in states with progressive cannabis laws, pregnancy remains a line that doctors and lawmakers refuse to cross. According to Dreher, in Illinois, hundreds of thousands of cannabis-related convictions have been expunged — yet pregnant women remain largely excluded from those reforms. “This is not about documentation,” she says. “It’s about convincing the public. And about misogyny. About control.”
Cannabis use by women, particularly mothers, provokes moral panic. In Dreher’s view, the plant threatens multiple power structures at once — pharmaceutical, medical, and cultural narratives about “good motherhood” — partly because it can’t be patented, packaged or controlled.
Parallel Paths Forward
Change won’t come from science alone. “We need parallel paths,” says Dreher. “Scientific validation and lived experience. Anecdotes matter, but the world demands data.” Until then, mothers remain silent, fearful and criminalized.
“There are so many women with secrets,” she says. “Underground, because they have to be. Because they’ll go to jail.” Still, Dreher is hopeful — especially in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, and storytellers who can reach hearts where academic journals have failed.
“More people will listen,” she says. “And we need that. We need all of it.”
“Cannabis is not harming mothers and babies. The system is.”
Melanie Dreher
After more than half a century of evidence, observation, and resistance, Dreher’s message remains unwavering: Cannabis is not harming mothers and babies. The system is.
This article reports on the research and views of Melanie Dreher, Ph.D., and her collaborators. It does not constitute medical advice. Readers with questions about cannabis use during pregnancy should consult a healthcare provider.
