Indopedia All Things Marijuana
Every time cannabis legalization or reform policies come up for debate before state or federal legislators, there is always a prohibitionist that will step in to argue that legalizing cannabis will increase crime rates. An increasing body of evidence is showing that the exact opposite may be the case, however. A new thesis paper published on the International Scholarship website has found that states with medical cannabis programs saw a reduction in the rates of murders and robberies between 1995 and 2015.
Matthew Incantalupo of the Haverford College Department of Economics compared medical marijuana patient registration rates in states with legal MMJ programs to crime rates in those same states. “A one percent increase in medical marijuana registration rates decreases murder and robbery rates by 0.03 percent and 0.02 percent, respectively, and has no significant effect on other types of crime,” he wrote. “These results show that increasing the legal availability of marijuana through medicalization could decrease murder and robbery rates, two crimes highly associated with the illegal drug trade.”
These findings match up with several other recent research studies…
