How legalized marijuana is working out in Colorado

How legalized marijuana is working out in Colorado September 29, 2015

The 17 states that are considering legalizing marijuana are being told about all kinds of economic benefits for doing so.  But in the case of Colorado, where legalized pot shops are proliferating, things haven’t worked out exactly as planned.  And there have been some unintended consequences.

From Dems want high voter turnout, use pot legalization to get it | Oklahoman.com:

But tax revenue resulting from marijuana in Colorado has failed to live up to pre-legalization projections. Colorado, with Washington state, legalized marijuana in 2012 and have begun implementing the policies statewide.

Colorado earned nearly $53 million in tax revenue from marijuana during in 2014. It’s the latest number to fall below the state’s expectations. This year, the Denver Sun-Times noted that, “Colorado’s marijuana tax [is] bringing in 42 percent less than projected.” Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed legalizing marijuana, also faces a bevy of other problems that pot has caused.

Drug traffickers have set up shop in Colorado since legalization, according to Tom Gorman, director of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program. Gorman’s division of the program falls under the larger federal program created by Congress in 1988 to provide assistance to federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies that operate in areas identified as “critical drug trafficking regions of the United States,” according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“Colorado has become a source area for marijuana for much of the rest of the country,” Gorman said. “We try to eliminate the black market, we’ve become the black market for so much of the rest of the United States. And that keeps going up and up and up, it hasn’t even leveled out yet.”

While Gorman said investigations prevent him providing certain details of criminal activity, his program has indications that drug trafficking organizations have tried to intimidate and extort legal marijuana dispensaries, while also seeking to exploit the legal market to further their own illegal aims.

A preview of the Rocky Mountain program’s 2015 report regarding marijuana legalization’s impact on the state shows seizures of marijuana leaving the state rose 25 percent from 2013 to 2014, when retail stores opened for business. The number of interdiction seizures has risen 592 percent since Colorado’s commercialization of medical marijuana in 2009, according to the report.

The drug’s legalization also may have had an effect on children’s health and teenage delinquency. The average percentage of children less than five years old who were exposed to marijuana in Colorado was approximately 8.6 percent from 2006 to 2009. That rate has since spiked, up to nearly 18 percent. The national average grew just 2 percent during the same time period.

The number of hospitalizations for children under age 12 due to marijuana ingestion decreased each year from 2011 through 2013, but doubled in 2014 to 16 total cases in Colorado, according to information provided by the Colorado Children’s Hospital.

Drug-related suspensions and expulsions of students ages 12 to 17 had decreased each year since the 2010-2011 school year, but ticked back up during the 2013-2014 school year following legalization, according to the Rocky Mountain report. After legalization, past month marijuana usage among the same age group grew by 6.6 percentage points.

While the report finds several negative unintended consequences resulting from legalized weed, Gorman said he does not know whether the rise in crime in Denver, Colorado’s largest city in terms of population, has a direct connection to legalization. But, he adds, law enforcement in the state could not be more confused.

“It’s very confusing, very complicated, and in my opinion a major hypocrisy on the laws of this country because what Colorado essentially has done is license and authorize people to violate federal law,” Gorman said. “For a cop it doesn’t compute with us because we take an oath of office [and] it’s like how does this work?”

 

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