Indopedia All Things Marijuana
Despite claims that legal marijuana states are causing trouble for neighboring areas of prohibition, a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds the majority of the trials and tribulations reported in these areas are mostly exaggerated.
Researchers from the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University have released a preliminary study entitled “The Cross-Border Spillover Effects of Recreational Marijuana Legalization,” which shows that the only perilous outcome from conflicting state marijuana laws is “a sharp increase in marijuana possession arrests” in border counties.
The report indicates that, “if a county shares a physical border with [a legalized] state, it experiences an increase in marijuana possession arrests of roughly 30 percent.”
This means law enforcement in those areas are likely creating their own problems by significantly ramping up efforts to bust people who purchase weed in legal states. These departments are spreading their forces thin in an effort to combat drug trafficking, but the study finds that the majority of the arrests are small time offenders.
Researchers found that the majority of…
