Credit: Creative Commons
After six months of legal marijuana in the State of Colorado, crime has decreased significantly and revenue is up, demonstrating just how beneficial legalization can be and just how wrong prohibition proponents who chirped the sky will fall have been.
As Laura Pegram notes, while it’s too early in the game to make any definitive conclusions about marijuana legalization, the following data points and trends are significant:
- According to Uniform Crime Reporting data for Denver, there has been a 10.1% decrease in overall crime from this time last year and a 5.2% drop in violent crime.
- The state has garnered over 10 million in taxes from retail sales in the first 4 months. The first 40 million of this tax revenue is earmarked for public schools and infrastructure, as well as for youth educational campaigns about substance use.
- The marijuana industry has developed quickly, generating thousands of new jobs. It is estimated there are currently about 10,000 people directly involved with this industry, with 1,000 to 2,000 gaining employment in the past few months alone.
- Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who opposed Amendment 64, recently compared Colorado’s economy since legalization to that of other states by noting, “While the rest of the country’s economy is slowly picking back up, we’re thriving here in Colorado.” For example, the demand for commercial real estate has increased drastically, with houses in the state appreciating up to 8.7 percent in the past year alone.
- By removing criminal penalties for certain marijuana-related offenses, thousands of individuals will avoid the collateral consequences associated with a criminal record. The state is estimated to potentially save $12-40 million over the span of a year simply by ending arrests for marijuana possession.
Credit: Creative Commons
This last point is particularly important from a both the standpoints of social justice and economics. First, the social justice angle: between 2001-2010, 52 percent of all drug arrests in America were for marijuana, with the vast majority of those arrested holding small amounts of the drug. To give some perspective, in 2010 alone, some 7 million people were arrested for possession, and most of those arrested were black, despite comparable usage statistics between blacks and whites.
Second, the economics angle: according to the ACLU, states spend over $3.5 billion every year enforcing marijuana laws, to say nothing of incarceration expenses, the loss of productive citizens and the damage done to family structures and our social fabric. This is money being wasted on the enforcement of policies that actually harm, rather than benefit, society, as evidenced by what is happening in Colorado.
Bottom line: more states should follow the lead set by Colorado (and Washington State), and I suspect with over 50 percent of Americans favoring legalization, follow they will.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, published recently by Oneworld Publications.
Follow him on Twitter @David_EHG.
There are so many evils associated with enforcement of draconian drug laws that legalization of marijuana has to look good, but there is much to learn about using mind altering drugs judiciously.
I read about a KHAT “ring” drug agents busted recently. The anti-drug police are loath to lose their livelihood, no matter how odious their income from it is.
It is sobering to realize how slow we as a society are to move toward “The Promised Land” of our dreams. We can get off fossil fuel. The sun can supply our daily energy, but we insist on building new power plants to provide power to electric water heaters in homes that are burning up under a hot sun, with mechanical refrigeration going full blast, not just to cool a food box or two, but for the whole house, which more and more, in the poorer areas of our country, is another factory made box, placed on its side with cheap windows, a door or two and very little insulation, not even the more effective foam insulation which we have mandated for the millions of new food cooling and freezing boxes we manufacture or import each year.
Marijuana was such a normal part of our lives 40 years ago. When I attended a Led Zeppelin concert in the 1970s, there were 15,000 or more in attendance and everyone smoking marijuana. There was no violence when we all left to go home after midnight and I don’t remember reports of traffic accidents either. Maybe the police were mellowed out by breathing second hand marijuana smoke, which we all could see rising from the baseball stadium in Atlanta, which had only begun to experience the booming, runaway growth which has overtaken the city and surrounding suburbs since then.
George
Unity, Maine
well, a bit of good news, for a change, a little ray of sunshine breaking through the heavy clouds of darkness that appear to be overtaking our world…………..
our modern world is nothing if not a civilization pretty literally built on layers upon layers of addictive substances, be it MONEY itself, myriads of LEGAL, YET DANGEROUS DRUGS, (prescription or over-the-counter), health-destroying, OVERLY REFINED FOODS, plus their endless ADDITIVES, poisonous AGRICULTURAL HORMONES, MEDICATIONS and PESTICIDES, PORNOGRAPHIC ADVERTISING……and so many more spiritually and emotionally destructive products easily available all around us everywhere……..(e.g., ‘soft-drinks’ as well as alcoholic beverages, cigarettes ……………even cellular devices of every imaginable kind for pleasure and convenience more than for purposeful, life-friendly use)…….
but let’s not kid ourselves…….the road to cleaning up all these poisons and insuring human rights and dignity above all politically devised laws created mostly to service the rich and powerful ones who control the mechanisms of our world., is a long and winding one………..at best…….