Indopedia All Things Marijuana
Los Angeles’ decade-long fight with unlicensed pot shops will be coming to a head soon, with state and city regulators set to make the transition from a medical to recreational cannabis industry within the next six months. But while LA politicians are trying their best to shut down the city’s slew of unregulated dispensaries and start anew for recreational, a new study published in the Journal of Urban Economics suggests that the city’s first wave of dispensary shutdowns actually helped raise local crime rates.
According to a deep dive from Cannabis Now, the researchers found that once the dispensaries disappeared, property crimes increased in the surrounding areas, a phenomenon that the authors of the study attributed to a lack of foot traffic and public engagement in the neighborhoods after the dispensary closures.
“Our results demonstrated that the dispensaries were not the crime magnets that they were often described as, but instead reduced crime in their immediate vicinity.” Study authors Tom Y. Chang and Mireille Jacobson told the Harvard Business Review. “And when breaking down the effect by types of crime, we found that the increases in crime…
