A Look at Crime Rates in Legal Adult-Use Cannabis States

A major part of the cannabis legalization process in many states occurs both before and after ratification — it’s called fearmongering. This unfortunate side effect of liberty takes on many forms: legal hypocrisy, religious and gender discrimination, racism, and so many more abhorrent realities. Much of the same misinformed and hateful rhetoric hardens and congeals around adult-use cannabis legalization and devolves into an infected blister of blame known as crime. Conservative politicians in the U.S. currently use crime rate as a catchall dog whistle for disturbing racism and ethnic cleansing, as we are seeing with excessive constitutional violations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the country. 

Cannabis advocates play an important role in this post-truth society. They stem the tide of disinformation and hypocrisy by demonstrating with verifiable facts and statistics that crime rates don’t increase after a state legalizes weed. 

What Are the Actual Facts About Crime Rates in Legal Adult-Use Cannabis States?

Sometimes legal weed brings out some of the silliest arguments. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida told his MAGA-heavy, HOA-loving state that they shouldn’t vote for it because the smell will be putrid. 

Josh Hawley, a Senator from Missouri — a state with a lucrative and safe adult-use cannabis program — called cannabis a gateway drug recently, doing a major disservice to many of the patients and consumers who use it for potential relief of many ailments. Despite these demagogues’ opinions, real numbers back up the overall safety and low rate of crime that legal cannabis brings with it.  

Case Study: New Jersey’s Legal Market Reduced Legacy Market Crime Rates

The former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, an all-around blowhard who now seems like such small potatoes in today’s bloody political landscape, famously referred to any potential legalization of cannabis in the Garden State as “blood money”.

Bloodshed is never justified, and statistics show that New Jersey has recorded only one homicide involving an adult-use dispensary employee since legalization in 2022. However, it’s also worth noting that New Jersey is the nation’s most densely populated state, with over 300 individual dispensaries. 

This recent article also documented that New Jersey’s cannabis related arrests were slightly more than 23,000 before legalization, all the way down to 502 in 2024 post-legalization. This figure aptly illustrates the drastic reduction in illicit market transactions and activity following the introduction of adult-use access.

Despite anti-progressive personalities and their dedicated fan bases, verifiable statistics and consistent research demonstrate that legal weed thrives without the sky falling.

National Crime Statistics, Studies, and Trends in Legal Adult-Use Cannabis States

Plenty of sociologists, researchers, and scholars have documented how legalization reduces crime rates in legal states. Their findings show that arrests and incarcerations decrease after researchers deeply analyze public records and published crime statistics from each state compared to benchmarks from pre-legalization times. 

The Original Legal States See No Significant Increases in Crime Since Legalization

Researchers published a paper in 2019 examining how retail dispensary locations in Denver, Colorado, affect local crime. They found that adding a dispensary in a neighborhood leads to “a reduction of 17 crimes per month per 10,000 residents”, contributing to a 10% reduction compared to the average crime rate during the same window studied. 

Researchers also noted that they found no evidence that dispensaries cause crime to spread into nearby neighborhoods—also known as spillover— nor evidence that increased cannabis consumption leads to more criminal activity. 

Justice Quarterly published a 2018 review titled “The Cannabis Effect on Crime: Time Series Analysis of Crime in Colorado and Washington. Their findings concluded that legalization causes no ill effects on public safety since legalization, demonstrating no significant long-term effects on violent crime and property.

The Journal of Drug Issues published a study in 2022 that analyzed state-level crime rate data in Colorado and Washington from 2000–2019. Their main takeaways were that not only does legal weed in Colorado and Washington not raise the crime rate index, but that “crime rates shouldn’t be a primary concern as more states move to adopt recreational marijuana use legislation”. Researchers also noted positive contributions as a result of legal adult-use programs like safe access, huge tax revenue, and more efficient policing. 

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Benefits of Using Police Resources Besides Cannabis Enforcement

Oregon’s adult-use program sales started in 2015. A study published in 2021 used multiple analytical and control methods with Oregon crime reports specifically for violent crime from 2007 up to 2017. Violent crime clearances — i.e., solved, prosecuted, or attributable crimes — increased because of better allocation of police resources, instead of enforcing marijuana violations. 

Bordering Counties & States See Decreases in Crime Rates

Another study from 2020 challenged spillover fears by public officials from neighboring border states where cannabis has been legalized. Researchers observed significant decreases in crime and theft rates in border counties of other states adjacent to Colorado. These findings further demonstrate the frivolity of fearmongering statements by officials in bordering states like Utah, Wyoming, Texas, and Oklahoma that have not legalized for adult-use.

Marijuana Dispensaries Are Associated with Higher Housing Values

A cross-referential study of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon found that median home values rose annually in cities and towns with a dispensary in comparison to places without one. The 2024 study concluded that dispensary openings in your city or town potentially yield an incredible $4,400 increase in your property’s overall value. 

A 2022 study from Rutgers University Policy Lab on the same subject found an even higher average increase of $6,366 in property value.

Dispensaries Aren’t Indoctrinating the Youth

Fearmongerers also claim that teens and young people will succumb to drug addiction and lead lives of crime because of legal weed; however, the statistics, as usual, say otherwise.

A 2023 study examined how adolescents consume cannabis in areas with medical and recreational dispensaries. Researchers concluded that young adults living near dispensaries weren’t more likely to consume cannabis, e-cigarettes, or spliffs. A similar study from 2021 also found that 10th and 12th-graders living in zip codes with a dispensary in Illinois showed significantly lower levels of cannabis use.    

Legal cannabis dispensaries aren’t selling to minors either. A 2023 study examined age verification rates in legal cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Portland. The findings demonstrated that dispensaries verified age in over 90% of transactions. The Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division conducted over 190 underage cannabis consumer compliance checks in 2022. Their investigations showed a 98% compliance rate, proving that the system and laws work responsibly.

Alcohol & Opioid Consumption Reduced in Legal States

Alcohol and opioids contribute to a very high fatality rate in the U.S. One of the main antagonists to alcohol and drug abuse can potentially be cannabinoids. Scientists have published numerous studies on the relationship between cannabinoids and addiction disorders, but what doesn’t get reported as much is how crime also goes down as a result. 

One study found that increased cannabis consumption lowers heavy alcohol use in Oregon adults, while access to retail cannabis in Washington was associated with lower opioid deaths and overdoses. These trends show how cannabis legalization’s effects ripple from the individual and out to the greater community around them—positively impacting hot-button issues like local crime rates. 

There Will Always Be One Battle After Another

Cannabis always faces an uphill battle, whether it’s already legalized or not. The conservative section of society and politics has thoroughly demonized the plant for almost a full century now in the U.S., establishing a firm base of misguided voices against its very existence.

Legal Weed Boosts Society

The wave of adult-use legalization disrupts those ghouls in more ways than we could have ever dreamed of. States that legalize not only create financially lucrative industries rife with jobs, but also economic boosts, disruption of the illicit market, and freedom from unjust incarceration. Perhaps we’re biased, but adult-use legalization just seems like a win-win for the states. 

These societal advancements, however, never cease to bring out the haters. Politicians in some legal states advanced legislation to curtail their adult-use cannabis industries. At the same time, the fearmongering by anti-legalization lobbies like Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) continues to pick and choose facts in their particular brand of gaslighting the public to believe that cannabis use correlates with higher crime rate.

Sometimes it’s a wonder the populations of many of these states could even agree on anything, let alone legal weed! However, in the fight against fearmongering, legal adult-use states are setting the right example.