Greens leader Richard Di Natale’s push to legalise cannabis makes sense at so many levels, not least of which is a correlated reduction in general crime rates which is highly likely to occur if weed is no longer sold on the black market.
In those American jurisdictions that have legalised cannabis for recreational and medical purposes there has been a marked drop in property crimes and crimes of violence.
Take Washington state. It legalised cannabis in 2012. Oregon, next door, legalised in 2014. A 2017 paper by Davide Dragone for the German based IZA Institute, found that that the “legalization of recreational marijuana caused a significant reduction of rapes and thefts” in those areas of Washington that border Oregon. The decline in crime is significant.
“For rapes, the reduction is 4.2 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants, which is about 30% of the 2010-2012 rate. For thefts, the reduction is 105.6 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants, which is about 20% of the 2010-2012 rate,” the paper notes.
Late last year a landmark study published in the The Economic Journal found that since the introduction of medical cannabis laws in the US the rate of violent crime such as robberies, murders and assaults, has declined in those areas close to the Mexico border by 12.5%.
As Professor Evelina Gavrilova, the lead author of the study told The Independent the decline is what one expects when legalisation takes place. “This means that people don’t need to buy illegal marijuana anymore so drug trafficking organisations have far fewer customers,” she said.
But wait, there’s more. Work done by researchers at University of California, Irvine published in 2017 shows a drop in neighbourhood crime when medical cannabis dispensaries are located in the area. Those findings were fortified by a study published by Jeffry Brinkman and David Mok-Lamme of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, who examined dispensaries in Denver, Colorado and concluded “adding a dispensary to a neighborhood (of 10,000 residents) decreases changes in crime by 19% relative to the average monthly crime rate in a census tract”.
The authors note their results “are consistent with theories that predict that marijuana legalization will displace illicit criminal organizations and decrease crime through changes in security behaviours”.
The great University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, writing with his colleague Kevin Murphy in 2013, succinctly linked the issues of drug prohibition and crime rates:
The paradox of the war on drugs is that the harder governments push the fight, the higher drug prices become to compensate for the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished. This is why larger drug gangs often benefit from a tougher war on drugs, especially if the war mainly targets small-fry dealers and not the major drug gangs. Moreover, to the extent that a more aggressive war on drugs leads dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption, an increase in enforcement can exacerbate the costs imposed on society.
There is not one magistrate, judge, prosecutor or defence lawyer that I have spoken to about cannabis who thinks that the current policy settings are having any impact. If only politicians would follow Richard Di Natale’s lead — and, in fairness, the Reason Party’s leader, Victorian MP Fiona Patten, has been strident and articulate on drug legalisation for many years — then we could discuss a rational cannabis policy.
One that reduces crime, raises revenue for the state and that recognises that almost everyone in Australia treats cannabis prohibition laws with the same amount of respect they treat rules against jay-walking: little or none at all.
*Greg Barns is a barrister and a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance.
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Now now, Greg, you can’t be bringing *facts* into policy making :p. The Libs-& even Labor-are far too busy pandering to the Prohibitionists (usually the Religious Right), whilst conveniently ignoring the far greater social & economic damage done via abuse of legal drugs like alcohol & cigarettes.
Its not just the religious right, its the right in general. Its really time this country’s politicians stopped listening to dumbass shock jocks like John Laws or Ray Hadley who’s views on these matters come straight out of 50s America, and look how thats turned out for them. In fact look at how current laws have turned out for Australia.
As GB noted above, virtually everyone involved at a legal or medical level have known for many years that we have to change our ways if we want things to improve. We now have imperial data from countries like Portugal, who decriminalised drug use in conjunction with a host of other measures and have experienced dramatic changes for the good in their society.
I meant empirical data of course 🙂
The problem is that cannabis has medicinal uses that will displace some pharmaceuticals.
And will bite into profits for alcohol and possibly tobacco companies (although it may increase tobacco use, who can say!)
“…“legalization of recreational marijuana caused a significant reduction of rapes and thefts”
Wow, that is just so weird. What this evidence suggest is that pot users will commit worst crimes imaginable (violence against females) unless they can buy their preferred drug cheaply and legally over the counter.
Whatever happened to the peaceful pot smoker who was supposedly less dangerous to themselves and others than drinkers? They’ll kill (and rape) to get stoned?
But I suppose I’ll be told that its the dealers and the growers who are the rapists and murderers of those US stats – and they’ll all pop off to reform school and become respectable businessmen once their only customer is the government agency the Greens are proposing. Trouble is, unless all drugs (including ecstasy, ice and heroin) are sold in those government supported shops DiNatale seems to think will pop up in every suburban high street (just watch the neighbourhood NIMBYs go berserk!), all those dealers will still be in business.
….and as if on cue, here we have one such loony Prohibitionist. Did you bother to read the actual article, showing that legalisation actually works? Or are all conservatives functionally illiterate?
Well, actually, he did. The point he made was that the crimes that were supposedly reduced because of legalisation are not crimes normally associated with cannabis use. Rape? Hardly! Theft? Well, maybe, I guess, but only if you assume that lots of people steal to feed their cannabis habit — oh, wait, cannabis isn’t addictive, is it, so there’s no such thing as a cannabis habit. So the reason for the reduction in the rate of theft is exactly what?
And did you notice that the statistics quoted were for “those areas of Washington that border Oregon”? But cannabis was legalised in the whole of Washington and the whole of Oregon. So what about the rest of those states?
Aww, here comes another semi-literate prohibitionist troll. Do you have any clue how expensive illegal marijuana is? Maybe not as expensive as heroin or cocaine, but still very costly. Also, the specially bred stuff sold by illegal dealers is allegedly really nasty stuff…..nothing like what people used to regularly smoke in the 1960’s to 1980’s. The point the author is clearly trying to make is that, in spite of all the ranting & raving about a crime spike if marijuana is legalised, we actually see crime rates dropping across the board. Oh, & this is speaking as someone who has never smoked cigarettes or smoked a joint……but I still see no reason why Marijuana is seen as worse than smoking. Yet that is how the moronic prohibitionists try to paint it.
Thanks for the ad hominem Marcus (on cue indeed). I’m not a prohibitionist, I was taking issue with the stats quoted in the article which just seemed weird to me… Nor was I arguing for the clearly unacceptable status quo.
But the Greens policy of a government supported and promoted industry of growers, distributors and retailers (profit-motivated franchises, or public servants? Has DiNatale spelt that out?) dispensing one drug and one drug alone – the one no doubt favoured by most of the party’s supporters – is a badly-conceived thought bubble hardly worthy of serious discussion.
Teddy, I appreciate that you don’t find the status quo acceptable. What remedies do you see, aside from decriminalisation, that haven’t been tried already. If we were to start last century with the objective to make the drug problem what it is today, we would do exactly what we have done.
“What this evidence suggest is that pot users will commit worst crimes imaginable”
Ease up Teddy. I have some regard for Barns when he is writing as a lawyer but, on this matter, he has displayed himself as a lousy statistician or at least a writer in sore need of a 50 hour on-line course in basic stats. The references that Barns has offered are “thin” to say the least (see my post that follows – down the line).
As to your question perhaps the would-be criminals have taken to pot and now suffer from various suppressible-belligerent and sexual dysfunctions. Just kidding. Don’t worry too much about it. The overall argument as to making cannabis legal (as it once was) is sound.
Even if the environments that provided for the procurement of cannabis as a legal good experienced no change in recorded crime the venture would still be justified.
As to the current vendors a market in “hard” drugs will always exist because, like gambling etc. a significant minority of people are fundamentally un-disciplined (read the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others). A sizable minority need hard drugs to make them feel good and such isn’t going to change in the short term.
Physical transportation might “solve” the hard drug problem as indeed the resettlement of refos in Green electorates.
Broadcasting’s ever reliable Dimwit Duo, Blot & the Poison Dwarf, have been going apeshit for the last two evenings during the mutual tongue bath on HateRadio.
Nothing new there but the sheer audacity is even more mendacious than usual with claims that legalisation will increase crime & violence, cost gazillions more in health care and embolden criminals.
I really recommend that people download the Mon & Tues segments just for the sheer outrageous comedy.
Blot now has a segment on his massively unwatched SKY show in which he and a guest get stuck into massively expensive whiskys – no connections surely.
Pardon my ignorance, but who are Blot and Poison Dwarf?
Andrew Bolt & Steve Price, 2GB radio,Sydney.
Thank you Mac and I concur with AR. I happened to be in my wife’s car the other morning and caught John Law’s ridiculous diatribe of nonsense.
Whats his tag by the way?
Can’t help you with a tag for Laws Bref but don’t ever tune into Blot & P.D. if you’ve been hitting the herb… that pair are a total buzz killer !
LOL
Great article Greg. I let out a deep sigh when I saw the Herald Scum headline on this yesterday. ‘Greens Gone To Pot’ it screamed, although I’m sure the Greens had a similar policy back in their early years, so it wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering event. The HS trotted out the usual suspects against the idea, such as a VP of the AMA, as well as Police Association Secretary Greg Davies who comes from the old school right wing coppers brigade, and who had the gall to say that legalisation would INCREASE crime. Talk about convoluted logic, but poor old Greg wasn’t considered the sharpest tool in the detective box by his former police colleagues. He even brought up the hoary old ‘gateway drug’ argument that was refuted eons ago. I suspect he thinks ‘Reefer Madness’ was a documentary.
Yes, there are good reasons not to smoke grass. If you have a predisposiiton to schizophrenia or some other mental conditions it’s a really bad idea, but if you have a predisposition to alcoholism it’s a bad idea to drink booze, and we don’t ban that do we? We don’t legislate to prevent people with a family history of lung cancer from smoking tobacco. We generally give our population the right to do whatever they want in their own lives if they freely choose to do it and understand the risks therein, when their actions don’t impinge on other people, even where there might be some medical risks. Why the obsession with putting weed in a different category, essentially on the same level as a scumbag drug like Ice or GHB?
Of interest today were the signifcant amount of letters to the editor printed in the HS which supported the idea of legalisation, in spite of their strident editorial line yesterday. I generally find it hard to take any editorialising in the HS very seriously (Blot, Panahi, McCrann et al), and in this case I find it quite funny when I think back to all the HS journos and staff I shared a joint with back when I used to partake. Just another bunch of MSM hypocrites.