marijuana than one would think and there’s big money involved,” explaining, “You can’t sue somebody for drug debt; the only way to get your money is through strong-arm tactics, and violence tends to follow that.”
To begin with, it’s a flawed premise – after all, if Cannabis were legalized, delinquent “drug debts” could be resolved through legal means of debt collection like liens and garnishments, not through violence. But even more importantly, scientific research doesn’t exactly line up with this reasoning.
reasoning.
For example, in January 2016, a study published in the Journal of Drug Issues set out to find whether the legalization of medical marijuana had increased violent crime and/or property crime in 11 states located in the western half of the U.S. The study, which controlled “for state-specific factors,” was clear in its conclusions: “There is no evidence of negative spillover effects from medical marijuana laws (MMLs) on violent or property crime.”
But the authors’ findings didn’t stop there.
They went a step further, showing, “Instead, we find significant drops in rates of violent crime associated with state medical marijuana laws.”
In other words, the legalization of medical marijuana had a neutral effect on property crime, which neither increased nor decreased, and a positive effect on violent crime, which decreased.
Echoing this research, public policy reports have reached similar conclusions when approaching the same issue from a law enforcement perspective. A 2015 presentation for the Association
KNOWLEDGE