This was made possible, in part, by the failure of the judiciary to rein in the power of an overzealous federal government. The Supreme Court has twice approved of this type of overreach. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich(2005), the Court ruled that individuals growing crops exclusively for personal consumption—wheat and marijuana, respectively—could be regulated by the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution despite the crops never entering a market of any kind, let alone across state lines.
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.
Under our constitution, criminal law has historically been left to state and local governments, not Congress. That is why, when the misguided government opted to prohibit the manufacture and distribution of alcohol in the 1920s, prohibitionists sought a Constitutional amendment granting the federal government the authority to ban alcohol. Alcohol prohibition ended, after years of corruption and unnecessary bloodshed, when the constitution was amended again to correct the mistake of the earlier amendment.
When the federal government wanted to ban drugs, however, it merely passed a federal law banning drugs, creating an obvious tension between the federal government and the states that have traditionally made their own decisions about what substances to permit or prohibit.
The result is a legal quagmire in which 42 states and the District of Columbia allow either medicinal or recreational use of marijuana, while the federal government insists that a nationwide prohibition remains in effect.
In November 2012 voters in the states of Colorado and Washington approved ballot initiatives that legalized marijuana for recreational use. Two years later, Alaska and Oregon followed suit.
Both supporters and opponents of legalizations initiatives make numerous claims about state-level marijuana legalization.
Advocates think legalization reduces crime, raises tax revenue, lowers criminal justice expenditures, improves public health, bolsters traffic safety, and stimulates the economy. Critics argue that legalization spurs marijuana and other drug or alcohol use, increases crime, diminishes traffic safety, harms public health, and lowers teen educational achievement.
A new policy analysis from the Cato Institute on the impact of recent marijuana legalizations in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska compares pre- and post-policy-change paths of marijuana, other drug or alcohol use, marijuana prices, crime, traffic accidents, teen educational outcomes, public health, tax revenues, criminal justice expenditures, and economic outcomes.
While insufficient time has elapsed since the four initial legalizations to allow strong inference, on the basis of available data, there is little support for the stronger claims made by either opponents or advocates of legalization.
In 2012, the people of Colorado voted to legalize marijuana through a state constitutional amendment, which went into effect in January of 2014. Two of Colorado’s neighbors, Nebraska and Oklahoma, subsequently filed a lawsuit urging the U.S. Supreme Court to prohibit the state of Colorado from constructing a regulatory regime for the marijuana industry.
“[Monday’s] action at the Supreme Court amounts to a big boost to the marijuana legalization movement, which continues to gather strength and momentum," write Cato scholars Tim Lynch and Adam Bates.
Given its overall popularity with the general public, it could be viewed as surprising that approximately half of the states still have not legalized medical marijuana. Opponents of medical marijuana, however, have employed a number of arguments, several of which focus on marijuana use by teenagers. New research from D. Mark Anderson, Benjamin Hansen and Daniel I. Rees examines the relationship between medical marijuana laws and marijuana consumption among high school students. Their results suggest that the legalization of medical marijuana is not accompanied by increases in marijuana use among high school students.
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