Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado

First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it's a good thing to have so few murders that it's hard to make generalizations.) March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.

Second, this isn't a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9. It's a 47.1% drop.

This is a very low quality article.

But really, there's been no change in how people act. The people that have always smoked it (hippies in the park and normal people at home) are still smoking it, and the people that don't smoke (myself included) still don't smoke.

So no lifestyle changes for the majority of the people in the state (except the people that get jobs now thanks to the legit industry and hopefully some lives saved by quality controlling the stuff) AND we get all the benefits.

Let's go national with this thing.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1waFpYd7jK9nUcb1VbPOL...

It's based on the raw data here:

http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20... http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20... http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...

Personally, I can't see any noticeable effect on crime except that drug violations and crimes against persons seem to be up this year. Or maybe I just didn't do a great job on the chart?

I think it's probably a stretch to link these two things together...

Also, it sounds like the government is already writing checks based on "predicted" income levels 4x what they are today.

I think legalization is a good idea but I wish people would give things a couple years before drawing meaningful conclusions from the data.

But surely there have been downsides, too, even if they're not the ones that fear-mongerers predicted. Can anyone in Colorado speak to what those are?

What I'd really like to see if related crime has dropped or increased - such as DUI, Theft, Assault, etc.

--Edit-- Thanks all for pointing out the piece I skimmed over :) ...However I am still very curious to smaller offenses and misdemeanors. It will be years before we see good statistics, but those elements will be politically crucial in pushing for wider adoption.

Here are some things to consider:

1) Only the revenue is really important to the politicians - there has been virtually no talk about using the money for rehabilitation programs, and only a little talk about using the money for drug education. So far the only tangible outcome I've heard was a proposed $3 million to be used to hire ~100 government personnel to handle administrative tasks related to marijuana sales and regulation. Given the fights that we see among politicians when it comes to spending other sources of revenue, I don't see it being any easier to get this new revenue spent appropriately either.

2) Correlation vs Causation re: lower crime. Who's to say it's not due to the beautiful sunny spring and summer that we have here in CO or the fact that it kept snowing in the mountains longer this year so people skied more? The one thing I have observed is that legalizing marijuana didn't convert a lot of non-users into users so at first blush it does not appear that legalizing marijuana has turned the state into a bunch of potheads (although I tire of hearing things like "Denver is the Silicon Valley of weed").

3) Because there's still no good research out on the effects (long, short, casual use) of marijuana (THC specifically) there is a lot of concern over the substantial increase in the amount of edibles, elixirs, and other marijuana infused products which can be purchased that are not well regulated or identified. The same argument can be made for the vapor/e-cig industry. Clearly identifying how much THC a product contains and what affect that will have on a person is much needed and should hopefully come about from the bills that Hickenlooper signed into law in May.

As others have said the reason you aren't hearing any news from Seattle/DC is because they do not have everything in place to allow stores to open up. Colorado moved quickly to both decriminalize as well as create regulations, tax structure, etc., which the other states have not done yet. Many states are watching CO to see how this plays out and based upon the revenue figures that are being released as long as there isn't a significant increase in directly correlated crime, I don't think the politicians will be able to turn down the money in the long run.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this vote. The marijuana debate is in a completely different place than it was 16 years ago when Congress blocked the counting of the votes for medical marijuana in D.C., but I could still see them interfering with the vote again.

Well, okay then.

One useful quote from there is not to get euphoric over revenue figures - first few months "people are not buying marijuana, people are buying freedom". A variety of things, such as novelty effect, natural curiosity and even social currency accumulation (people who live in Colorado/Washington brag to their friends outside of those states) motivate the first purchases, you have to look at longer timeline to properly extrapolate the expected sales.

They need to also compare with demographically similar cities and counties that did not legalize marijuana. Crime is often heavily influenced by national or broad regional factors. You have to identify and account for this when trying to figure out how much of an affect a local factor (such as marijuana legalization in your state) had.

graff graff.