Harvard professor weighs in: What will change if Massachusetts marijuana is legalized?
FALL RIVER, Mass. We are either facing the end of the world or utopia, depending on whom you ask.
Either way, both pro and con forces say life will change based on the vote for referendum Question 4, which asks if Massachusetts marijuana should be legalized for recreational use.
Proponents say legal marijuana will raise tax revenue, reduce crime, stimulate the economy and improve public health.
Opponents say legal marijuana will increase the use of alcohol and other drugs, increase crime, cause traffic accidents and cause teenagers to skip school.
But Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska say dont worry about it. No matter which way the vote goes, nothing much will change, according to Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron.
Miron is a senior lecturer on economics and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank.
Miron joined researchers Angela Dills and Sietse Goffard to write a paper for the Cato Institute in September, offering a statistical analysis of the effect of referenda in Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska that legalized the recreational use of marijuana.
Massachusetts will be one of 11 states considering that question on election day.
Based on the four states, we didnt find any changes or any of the outcomes that have been projected, Miron said. Any changes were very minor.
What we found was evidence of increased tax revenue. The four states have taken in a modest amount of increased revenue as a result of the change.
The paper looks at the legal history of marijuana laws it was legal through the United States until 1913 when California became the first state to prohibit it. The federal government first got involved in 1937, when it imposed a prohibitively high tax on marijuana. Possession of marijuana did not become a federal crime until the 1950s.
Washington, Oregon and Alaska made medical marijuana legal in 1998. Colorado made recreational marijuana legal in 2012. (In Massachusetts, medical marijuana is legal. Possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is a civil rather than criminal offense.)
Miron and company looked at a decade of statistics from Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. In those studies, both marijuana and alcohol use remained steady, both before and after legalization. Marijuana prices remained stable and suicide rates showed no appreciable increase or decrease.
Admissions to emergency rooms in Colorado for treatment of alcohol or marijuana both declined slightly after marijuana was made legal. In Washington, ER ...
