The idea that marijuana dispensaries attract crime has proved influential with policymakers. Yet, empirical evidence to support any link between marijuana dispensaries and crime is quite limited.
In Los Angeles, for example, the city council cited crime in its 2010 decision to cap the number of dispensaries in the city. On June 7, 2010, roughly 70% of the nearly 600 shops operating in the City of Los Angeles were ordered to close. The shutdown came after years of concern and indecision over how to handle the burgeoning medical marijuana dispensary business in the city. In September 2007, the city adopted an Interim Control Ordinance, placing a temporary moratorium on new dispensaries and requiring existing dispensaries to register with the city by November 13, 2007.
Given the limited time that dispensaries had to submit a registration form along with the required city business tax registration certificate, registration was quite ad hoc. How the city would use the registrations was unclear, and the market continued to grow for several years despite the moratorium. In January 2010, final regulations, including closure orders, were adopted. The new ordinance set the number of dispensaries in the city at 70. Dispensaries that had registered between September and November 2007 and had been operating legally since that time were grandfathered, meaning that the number of legal dispensaries in the city could exceed 70 in the short term.
Closure orders were not correlated with observable dispensary characteristics (including the level of or trend in crime around specific dispensaries) that might have otherwise made them of specific interest to law enforcement.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence that closures decreased crime. Instead, there was a significant relative increase in crime around closed dispensaries. Like compliance with the closure orders themselves (which was at first high, then fell off with legal challenges, and finally collapsed after a December 2010 injunction), the increase in crime is temporary. Relative crime rates return to normal within four weeks. The increase is also very local—the estimated crime effects decrease rapidly with distance around dispensaries.