Leonid Bershidsky
Marijuana is less of an issue in the 2016 election campaign than
could be expected: This is, after all, the first presidential race after
Colorado and Washington legalized the recreational use of pot.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson are the only candidates still in the race who say unequivocally that as president, they would enforce federal laws against marijuana possession in the states that have legalized recreational use. Billionaire Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich say it’s a states’ rights issue. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders would even allow marijuana businesses to use federal banks. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she’s watching the Colorado and Washington experiments with an open mind.
Andrew Freedman, Colorado’s director of marijuana coordination, told me the jury is still out on the Colorado experience. “We need long-term data,” he said.
Denver has had a sharply growing crime rate since 2013, the year after Amendment 64, which permitted the sale of marijuana for recreational use. But causation, indeed, is hard to establish. There’s anecdotal evidence that legal pot has made Denver a magnet for the homeless, and they are a highly visible presence, but statistically speaking, Denver has a lower homelessness rate than many other big U.S. cities — 17 per 10,000 inhabitants, compared, for example, with 44 in New York.
The prevalence of marijuana use is higher in Colorado than the U.S. average, but that doesn’t mean much without matching data on any health costs associated with it. The number of hospitalizations and emergency room visits with marijuana-related diagnoses or billing codes has grown sharply, but there’s not a huge number of them. In the first half of 2015, there were 592.6 of them per 100,000 hospitalizations and ER visits, compared with 437.5 in 2013.
In 2015, the number of drivers charged with having used marijuana dropped slightly compared with the previous year. The police reported 665 such cases in 2015, about 15 percent of all driving-under-the-influence cases.
Anyone coming to Denver with expectations of a lively coffee shop scene, like the one in the Netherlands, or wide tolerance for smoking in bars or on the street, as in some areas of Berlin, will be disappointed. Pot is banned in most public places. Selling is the business of about 1,000 retail stores that look like hybrids of a pharmacy and an Apple store. You can’t sample the goods.
One reason for this is continued wariness on the part of local authorities and the restaurant industry. Last year, legalization advocates had to withdraw a ballot initiative to legalize the use of pot in clubs after meeting with more resistance than they counted on.
Legalizing retail pot sales without a matching relaxation in public-use rules has spawned an industry in so-called edibles — chocolate bars, gummies, cookies and a range of other projects infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, pot’s active substance. Edibles made up about 45 percent of all Colorado marijuana sales in 2014 and probably at least as much in 2015.
Dan Caplis, an injury lawyer and talk radio host who has campaigned against legalization, said of the candy-like edibles, “They are made to hide use at school, at work, from family members.”
Eating a THC chocolate gave the New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd a near-death experience in 2014. These things are notoriously hard to dose, and even experienced smokers sometimes have trouble figuring out how much to eat. Children can accidentally swallow the edibles, too. In nine years starting in 2000, only one in 100,000 hospitalizations and emergency room visits by children under the age of 9 resulted from marijuana exposure. In 2014 there were 10 such visits per 100,000 and in the first half of 2015 there were 13.
Colorado has stepped up the regulation of edibles recently, making producers mark them in 10-milligram doses and putting some warnings on the packages. Still, the edibles are to smokable pot what hard liquor is to beer and wine. It’s tempting, especially when social use is still stigmatized, to swallow a big dose in seconds so that no one is the wiser.
The marijuana business is already an economic force. Last year, $1 billion worth of marijuana products was sold in Colorado. The state collected $135 million in marijuana taxes and license fees in 2015. That’s about three times the revenue the state received from excise taxes on alcohol.
In other words, the fledgling industry’s political power is growing. Polls have showed continued support for marijuana legalization in Colorado. In time, it will become clearer which parts of the Colorado experiment have been a success and which haven’t.
Colorado regulators may be making a negative contribution to that future debate by regulating font sizes more rigorously than the use of edibles, and by not doing enough to help marijuana users create a comfortable social environment for themselves, the way alcohol drinkers have done.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson are the only candidates still in the race who say unequivocally that as president, they would enforce federal laws against marijuana possession in the states that have legalized recreational use. Billionaire Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich say it’s a states’ rights issue. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders would even allow marijuana businesses to use federal banks. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she’s watching the Colorado and Washington experiments with an open mind.
Andrew Freedman, Colorado’s director of marijuana coordination, told me the jury is still out on the Colorado experience. “We need long-term data,” he said.
Denver has had a sharply growing crime rate since 2013, the year after Amendment 64, which permitted the sale of marijuana for recreational use. But causation, indeed, is hard to establish. There’s anecdotal evidence that legal pot has made Denver a magnet for the homeless, and they are a highly visible presence, but statistically speaking, Denver has a lower homelessness rate than many other big U.S. cities — 17 per 10,000 inhabitants, compared, for example, with 44 in New York.
The prevalence of marijuana use is higher in Colorado than the U.S. average, but that doesn’t mean much without matching data on any health costs associated with it. The number of hospitalizations and emergency room visits with marijuana-related diagnoses or billing codes has grown sharply, but there’s not a huge number of them. In the first half of 2015, there were 592.6 of them per 100,000 hospitalizations and ER visits, compared with 437.5 in 2013.
In 2015, the number of drivers charged with having used marijuana dropped slightly compared with the previous year. The police reported 665 such cases in 2015, about 15 percent of all driving-under-the-influence cases.
Anyone coming to Denver with expectations of a lively coffee shop scene, like the one in the Netherlands, or wide tolerance for smoking in bars or on the street, as in some areas of Berlin, will be disappointed. Pot is banned in most public places. Selling is the business of about 1,000 retail stores that look like hybrids of a pharmacy and an Apple store. You can’t sample the goods.
One reason for this is continued wariness on the part of local authorities and the restaurant industry. Last year, legalization advocates had to withdraw a ballot initiative to legalize the use of pot in clubs after meeting with more resistance than they counted on.
Legalizing retail pot sales without a matching relaxation in public-use rules has spawned an industry in so-called edibles — chocolate bars, gummies, cookies and a range of other projects infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, pot’s active substance. Edibles made up about 45 percent of all Colorado marijuana sales in 2014 and probably at least as much in 2015.
Dan Caplis, an injury lawyer and talk radio host who has campaigned against legalization, said of the candy-like edibles, “They are made to hide use at school, at work, from family members.”
Eating a THC chocolate gave the New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd a near-death experience in 2014. These things are notoriously hard to dose, and even experienced smokers sometimes have trouble figuring out how much to eat. Children can accidentally swallow the edibles, too. In nine years starting in 2000, only one in 100,000 hospitalizations and emergency room visits by children under the age of 9 resulted from marijuana exposure. In 2014 there were 10 such visits per 100,000 and in the first half of 2015 there were 13.
Colorado has stepped up the regulation of edibles recently, making producers mark them in 10-milligram doses and putting some warnings on the packages. Still, the edibles are to smokable pot what hard liquor is to beer and wine. It’s tempting, especially when social use is still stigmatized, to swallow a big dose in seconds so that no one is the wiser.
The marijuana business is already an economic force. Last year, $1 billion worth of marijuana products was sold in Colorado. The state collected $135 million in marijuana taxes and license fees in 2015. That’s about three times the revenue the state received from excise taxes on alcohol.
In other words, the fledgling industry’s political power is growing. Polls have showed continued support for marijuana legalization in Colorado. In time, it will become clearer which parts of the Colorado experiment have been a success and which haven’t.
Colorado regulators may be making a negative contribution to that future debate by regulating font sizes more rigorously than the use of edibles, and by not doing enough to help marijuana users create a comfortable social environment for themselves, the way alcohol drinkers have done.
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