Colorado and Washington are now more drug-friendly than Amsterdam. Two ballot initiatives passed by the US states on Tuesday legalise not only the recreational use of marijuana, but also its mass production and sale. This brings the country into uncharted territory: no one knows how legal access to the drug will affect America鈥檚 drug trade, Mexico鈥檚 cartel violence or public health.
Legalisation is often promoted as a way to tackle drug violence at the US-Mexican border: . But the use of marijuana is still a federal crime, so any reduction in violence is likely to depend on President Obama鈥檚 approach to the two states.
In both bills, it remains illegal to transport the drug across state lines. But if federal regulators decide not to crack down inside the states, it could become much less expensive for Americans to buy marijuana from Colorado than from Mexico. The price increases $450 per pound for every 100 miles the drug is transported from the Mexican border. 鈥淚f you apply the same gradient as you move from Colorado to New York State, that鈥檚 way below what New York is now paying,鈥� says , a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Cartel losses
Switching to American-grown marijuana could deal a significant blow to the drug cartels. Research from the RAND Corporation鈥檚 Drug Policy Research Center based in Santa Monica, California, estimates that marijuana trafficking accounts for around 20 per cent of the cartels鈥� income: about $6 to $8 billion. Another study estimated that legalisation in Washington alone would subtract $1.4 billion from the cartels鈥� profits.
That is, however, assuming that the federal agents don鈥檛 step in to block interstate trade first, preventing the creation of a national market. 鈥淚t鈥檚 tough to imagine a scenario where a couple of states would have an impact,鈥� says of the RAND Corporation.
But even if the cartels take a hit, it鈥檚 not clear what effect that would have on violence at the border. Since the Mexican government began to crack down on the drug trade 10 years ago, drug-related killings in Mexico have increased eight-fold, while marijuana trafficking rates have changed little. Cutting off the cartels鈥� income could break them up, Caulkins says, but it could also simply drive them toward more lucrative forms of crime such as kidnapping and human trafficking.
鈥淥bama鈥檚 got a tough decision on his hands,鈥� says Caulkins. The administration said in 2008 that it would not impinge on state medical marijuana laws. But federal regulators have recently begun , rather than those using the drug for medicinal purposes. Caulkins adds that he could also envision an infuriated Congress 鈥減unishing鈥� the states by cutting off funds for projects such as highways.
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What happened this week was groundbreaking, says Kilmer, not least in that it now provides public health researchers with a real way to examine the effects of marijuana on a population that no longer needs to skirt the law. Most evidence suggests that the negative health effects of marijuana use are a fraction of those from tobacco, alcohol or hard drugs. ().
Researchers will be paying particularly close attention to the way legalisation affects alcohol intake. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e optimistic, as marijuana use goes up, alcohol use will go down,鈥� Caulkins says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a big win: alcohol generates a lot more social harm.鈥� But it鈥檚 equally possible that greater marijuana use will lead to greater alcohol abuse. Even a 10 per cent shift in alcohol use, in either direction, would be 鈥渁 bigger deal than anything that could happen with marijuana鈥� itself.
The few studies on whether alcohol and marijuana reinforce one another or act as a substitute for the other conflict wildly, says of the University of California in Los Angeles. 鈥淭he states haven鈥檛 gotten within a million miles of that question.鈥�
And what about the slippery slope to harder drugs? The Netherlands decriminalised the possession of small amounts of cannabis in 1976, and legal pot can be readily obtained in 鈥渃offee shops鈥� all over the country. , says that cannabis users are more likely to use other drugs than people who do not use drugs at all, but legal cannabis users are no more likely to do so than illegal users, either elsewhere in Europe, or within the Netherlands. In fact, recent Dutch research found that the further teenagers live from a coffee shop, the more likely they were to get cannabis from an illegal provider 鈥� and to use that provider鈥檚 other goods, such as cocaine or ecstasy.
Another common argument against legalisation is that it will increase the use of cannabis itself. The Dutch experience suggests not: in 1970 20 per cent of Dutch 18-year-olds had used cannabis at least once. In 1987, 11 years after decriminalisation, it was 18 per cent.
鈥淭here is no empirical evidence that legalisation causes the prevalence of cannabis use to go up,鈥� says Korf. Nor has it led to people using the drug for longer or starting earlier. The average age of a Dutch first-time cannabis user is 19.6, versus the early teens in the US.
With for-profit businesses now certain to jump in on the market in the US, the laws concerning advertising, marketing and other regulations 鈥� such as whether the drug can be sold at bars 鈥� are bound to shape the market. Caulkins predicts that we will see an explosion of weed-themed novelties such as Amsterdam-like coffee shops or ganja-gummy bears as producers try to differentiate their product.
State legalisation may turn out to be a good laboratory, Kleiman says. If the legislation turns out to be a disaster, the feds can step in and end the experiments. Either way, it鈥檚 the only way we鈥檙e going to find out about the public health implications, he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not a problem we can solve theoretically.鈥�
