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Abstract
The study analyzed the criminogenic effect of legalizing recreational marijuana dispensaries in Denver. Street segments with recreational dispensaries experienced no changes in violent, disorder and drug crime but did experience an 18% increase in property crime, and street segments adjacent to recreational dispensaries experienced some notable (but non-significant) drug and disorder crime increases. Medical dispensaries demonstrated no significant crime changes. A cost-benefit analysis found the associated crime costs were largely offset by sales revenue. Monetary benefits were much less pronounced, and barely cost effective, when only considering tax revenue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 There are now 11 states, plus DC, with recreational marijuana laws (www.governing.com, 2019).
2 Only 36 street segments simultaneously housed separate recreational and medical marijuana dispensaries. This is a relatively small amount of co-location when considering the number of dispensaries in Denver, and thus, the presence of the other dispensary type was not controlled for in the local analyses.
3 Thiessen polygons begin with a center point and continuously expand in size in all directions until the boundaries become closer to the boundaries of another expanding point in the dataset.
4 To reduce the influence of the segments with a dispensary on the spatial effect analysis, all segments with a dispensary (regardless of the type) were dropped from the analysis even if they were a spatial neighbor for a different segment with a dispensary. Thus, dispensary segments were not doubly counted.
5 The study incorporated 924 segments in the recreational marijuana spatial effects analysis and 583 segments for the medical marijuana spatial effects analysis.
6 Although few dispensaries appeared to have closed in the post-period, many were not open for the entirety of the three-year time period. The exact date a dispensary opened and/or closed was not provided within the data. Using the additive time-periods as opposed to exclusively running the post-period as a three-year blocked time period may better capture some of the potential differences in crime levels across each year post legalization.
7 The geocoding rate for all crimes using the provided XY coordinates was 99.7%.
9 InfoGroup: ATMs, bars, banks, check-cashing/payday loans, liquor stores, nightclubs/lounges, and restaurants. Denver Open Data Portal: food stores, shopping centers, retail stores, motels, hotels, supermarkets, small grocery stores, supercenters, convenience stores, and dollar stores.
10 We acknowledge recent critiques of using intangible costs in cost-benefit analysis, specifically that such measures are likely biased upwards (Tonry, Citation2015) and provide little practical value to policy makers limited by budget constraints (Piza et al., Citation2016). However, we felt including intangible victim costs was important given the nature of the policy being evaluated. Given that crime level changes are a possible side effect, rather than primary goal, of recreational marijuana legalization including intangible costs ensures that the full effect of the unintended crime increase is reflected in the analysis.
14 Covariates 1–4 on the list.
15 Each of the five measures is transformed from a percentage to a z-score and then is summated into a singular score representing the standard deviation from the mean disadvantage level for every census block group in the study area (there are 481 unique census block groups in Denver).
16 The following commercial establishments comprised the commercial activity count variable: ATMs, bars, banks, check-cashing/payday loans, nightclubs/lounges, food stores, shopping centers, recreational stores, motels, hotels, supermarkets, small grocery stores, supercenters, convenience stores, and dollar stores.
17 Adapted from regional planning, LQs allow for the identification of areas with features of interest (in this case, high crime street units) that are higher, lower, or at the expected city-wide rate (Brantingham & Brantingham, Citation1997).
18 Tables and figures for all non-significant results are presented in an appendix available as online supplemental material.