Marijuana-caused psychosis is an obvious risk for violence. Yet cannabis is associated with a surprising amount of violence even without overt psychosis. The assaults and homicides around small-time marijuana dealing are the most common example. Those happen every day and rarely attract more than local attention.
Sometimes police or news reports mention the perpetrators were using marijuana at the time of the crime. More often they don’t, so knowing for certain is impossible. But even if the reports don’t specifically mention use, assuming that people dealing or trying to steal marijuana are often using the drug seems reasonable.
All that can be said for sure is that the crimes occur with extraordinary frequency. (Google “marijuana murder” or “marijuana homicide” for yourself.) They range from simple retail rip-offs gone wrong to complicated and premediated robberies, like the case of Garrett Coughlin. Coughlin, a 24-year-old Colorado man with no criminal history, allegedly shot and killed three people in February 2017 at a house west of Denver where marijuana was being illegally grown.
In keeping with the lack of information around cannabis and violence, law-enforcement agencies often lump crimes around marijuana dealing in the broader category of drug crime. Even that classification can be confusing, since drug-related crimes fall in different groups. They include possession, crimes committed to pay for drugs, and trafficking-related conflict, as well as the violence due to drug effects like psychosis or intoxication.
But a few agencies have recently begun to note the amount of violence specifically related to cannabis dealing.
York County, South Carolina, has about 250,000 people. From 2015 through early 2018, 41 people were arrested for homicide there. Twenty-three of those were involved in drug deals. Of those, 17 cases involved marijuana, and either the seller or the buyer was killed. “The most common way to die by homicide in York County is over drug rip-offs involving pot,” Willy Thompson, a prosecutor, told the local newspaper.
In June 2018, Atlanta police chief Erika Shields said that many murders in the city were “tied to marijuana, in this day and age of medical marijuana . . . crimes are being committed for it.” Shields’s comments were particularly striking because Atlanta’s homicide rate is so high—about four times the national average. (An Atlanta newspaper called the Northside Neighbor reported Shields’s comments, which she made to a Rotary Club. Unfortunately, after initially saying through a spokesperson that she was “interested” in an interview, she later declined to speak or provide department statistics.)
Similarly, the Las Vegas police department noted an “emerging trend” in its 2017 annual report “of drug-related altercations where someone gets robbed or killed over a relatively small amount of drugs or marijuana.” The number of murders in Las Vegas soared 80 percent between 2011 and 2017, from 79 to 141, even excluding the 58 people killed in the music festival mass shooting in October 2017.
But marijuana is illegal in South Carolina and legal only for limited medical use in Georgia. It was legalized for recreational use in Nevada only in mid-2017. Crimes around dealing might be expected in those states. What about states like Colorado or Washington, where the drug is fully legal and has been for years? Proponents of legalization have long argued moving marijuana onto a regulated market would reduce violence around black-market dealing.
More broadly, they argue marijuana’s apparent association with crime occurs precisely because the drug is illegal. In other words, some law-abiding people will drink alcohol but won’t use marijuana, simply because using it inherently means they are breaking the law.
Thus, the population of users inherently excludes some people who are law-abiding and at low risk for violence. As a result, cannabis use may seem to have a spurious association with violence.
If cannabis advocates are correct and those two theories are true, legalizing shouldn’t increase violence. In fact, it will likely decrease it by creating a safer state-regulated market.
Unfortunately, the opposite has happened.
George Brauchler, the district attorney for Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, which includes Arapahoe County, told me his jurisdiction has seen 11 murder cases since 2012 related to black-market marijuana sales. “All it [legalization] has done is professionalize the black market,” Brauchler said.
Colorado residents can now legally keep up to twelve cannabis plants at their homes. But enforcing the twelve-plant limit is difficult. The easiest place to hide an illegal marijuana grow is alongside a legal grow. Police have basically no way of knowing whether a house has twelve plants or twice that many.
Even twelve plants can easily produce 10 pounds or more of marijuana a year, more than even the heaviest smoker can consume. That excess homegrown marijuana and the high-THC wax and shatter made from it can’t enter the state system. Instead, it is often sold illegally, for lower prices than the regulated and taxed products sold at dispensaries. On Craigslist, Colorado sellers offer an ounce of shatter for $350; a gram of shatter at a dispensary usually costs $30 or more, or $840 an ounce—though dispensaries cannot legally sell more than eight grams at once.
The price gap has created a thriving and dangerous black market. Both Colorado residents and out-of-state traffickers take advantage, Darcy Kofol, the chief narcotics prosecutor for the 18th District, told me. As of mid-2018, she spent three-quarters of her time on black-market cannabis cases, not opioids or other drugs. Those deals often come with violence, sometimes preplanned by either the dealers or the buyers, sometimes spontaneous.
“We’ve seen a lot of Craigslist violent crimes,” Kofol said.
The issue of oversupply and black-market supply in states that legalize has no solution. Marijuana is simply too easy to grow. In Oregon, which gave grower’s licenses to almost anyone who wanted one, state regulators reported almost 1 million pounds of legal marijuana piled in warehouses in early 2018—four ounces for every adult in the state, and three years of supply based on 2017 sales.
As a result, retail prices in Oregon fell in half in the last two years. Some stores in 2018 offered an ounce of marijuana for as little as $50. But they are still higher than black-market prices. Worse, as prices fall in the legal system, the burden of state taxes and regulations increases compared to the overall revenue that growers and dispensaries make. Some smaller, less efficient growers will simply close up shop. Others may shift—or shift back—to the black market.
In other words, legalizing marijuana doesn’t end the black market in marijuana. It just makes the drug cheaper, on both the legal and illegal markets. Those lower prices increase availability and drive up use.
Crime follows.
Cannabis advocates told voters legalization would lower crime by giving police officers a chance to enforce more important laws. “Legalization Will Reduce Crime, Free Up Police Resources” was the headline of an opinion piece by the former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper on CNBC.com in 2010.
Advocates are still sending that message. In August 2017, Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, introduced a bill to end federal prohibition of cannabis. In his announcement on Facebook Live, Booker linked legalization to falling crime—specifically violent crime.
“You see what’s starting to happen around this country right now. Eight states and the District of Columbia have moved to legalize marijuana . . . these states are seeing decreases in violent crime,” Booker said. “They’re seeing their police forces be able to focus their time, energy, and resources [on] serious crime.”
When he made his announcement, only four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington—had allowed recreational cannabis sales for more than a few months. (Voters in the District of Columbia and four others had also approved legalization at the time, but of that later group, only Nevada was allowing recreational sales, and it had just begun.)
So decent data on crime trends was—and is—available only on those first four states. Colorado and Washington are the largest of the four and were the first two to allow recreational sales, in 2014. Their last pre-legalization year was 2013. (Alaska and Oregon legalized in 2015, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll use 2013 data for them, too.)
State agencies like the Colorado Bureau of Investigation take a few months to compile data from local agencies, so the most recent statewide data available only covers 2017. Comparing 2017 to 2013 might seem like a fool’s game—four years is hardly enough time to detect a trend either way.
Except it is. And the trend is ugly.
In 2013, Washington had 160 murders and about 11,700 aggravated assaults, according to statewide data that the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs provides to the FBI for its annual national crime report. In 2017, the state had 230 murders and 13,700 aggravated assaults—an increase of about 44 percent for murders and 17 percent for aggravated assaults. That increase far outpaced the national rise in crime. Murders rose about 20 percent nationally from 2013 to 2017, and aggravated assaults about 10 percent.
The other three states saw the same trend. In each of them, murders and serious assaults rose faster than the national average, even after accounting for population growth. Combined, the four states had about 450 murders and 30,300 aggravated assaults in 2013. They had about 615 murders and 37,800 aggravated assaults in 2017.
A statistical analysis showed only a 6 percent probability that the fact murders rose faster in the four marijuana states than the United States was due to chance—and almost no probability that the aggravated assault rise was due to chance.
The crime increase isn’t a statistical anomaly. It’s real.
Without examining each case, knowing how many crimes were marijuana related is impossible. But at the least, marijuana advocates need to stop claiming that legalization reduces violent crime when it so clearly doesn’t.
Booker is fortunate that he’s a media darling. A less-liked politician would have been called a liar for getting his facts so wrong.
• • •
But only if anyone knew the facts about marijuana and violence.
We live in an age of big data, an age when every news blip is tweeted instantly to millions. After a while, I began to wonder what I suspect you’re wondering now: How could no one else know about these numbers? How could a senator make a false argument about marijuana and violence—while introducing a bill to legalize the drug nationally—without being called on his error?
How could the executive director of the Washington sheriffs’ and police chiefs’ association tell a newspaper in July 2017 that “it would be a strain to correlate violent crime and marijuana usage . . . I would struggle to believe that the legalization of marijuana or more legalization relates to violent crime”? Didn’t he read his own group’s report?
But modern policing in the United States is complicated. The Black Lives Matter movement has become a huge issue. So has the debate around firearm violence, and the question of the proper police response to the opioid epidemic.
Further, murder is extraordinarily rare, even in the United States. In 2013, the recent trough for crime, the risk that an American would be murdered had fallen to about 1-in-25,000. The risk that someone will commit murder is even lower, since some people kill more than once. Even in big, high-crime cities, the drivers of violence can take years to become obvious.
But there’s another factor. Like everyone else, police officers face what scientists call confirmation bias. That term is a fancy way of saying that we look for evidence that supports what we think we already know. Cops see the connection between drugs and violence more intimately than anyone. But in Western states they often focus on the terrible crimes associated with methamphetamine. In big Eastern and Midwestern cities they look at heroin and cocaine dealing as a source of problems.
Like everyone else, they have been told for a generation that marijuana doesn’t cause violence, that the belief it did came out of racist propaganda. The evidence to the contrary lies in dozens of different scientific journals and crime reports; it piles up month by month, but it’s so scattered that almost no one has put it together.
Yet.
I grew to take a certain cold comfort in the PDFs filling folders on my computer. The studies and reports were real, even if no one knew about them. Besides, they were easier to read than the arrest warrants and news stories and police reports. I found victims even when I wasn’t looking:
• Christian Pearson, 10, an Arizona boy allegedly beaten and burned to death by his mother and stepfather in June 2017. His mother told police officers she had just come home from a medical marijuana dispensary when she found him severely injured.
• Giovanni Diaz, 15, a Florida teen allegedly beaten to death with a baseball bat by his 16-year-old “best friend” in March 2018 after they smoked marijuana in a park.
• Jimi Patrick, 19, Dean Finocchiaro, 19, Thomas Meo, 21, and Mark Sturgis, 22, Pennsylvania men lured to a farm in July 2017 by a man who offered to sell them marijuana. Once they arrived, the dealer, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, killed them, burned three of their bodies, and buried all four in a mass grave.
• Mia Ayliffe-Chung, 20, and Tom Jackson, 30, British backpackers stabbed to death at a hostel in Queensland, Australia, in August 2016 by a French traveler. Judge Jean Dalton—the same justice who oversaw the Raina Thaiday child-killing case—found the killer not guilty by reason of marijuana-caused schizophrenia. He had smoked four cigarettes a day for years and believed the people at the hostel wanted to kill and cook him.
• Ashley Mead, 24, a Colorado mother killed by the father of her 1-year-old daughter in February 2017. He dismembered her body and left her torso in a Dumpster. In an arrest warrant, the Boulder police noted a large box “half-full of empty marijuana bottles” in the apartment Mead and her boyfriend shared and reported a neighbor smelled marijuana smoke constantly.
• The nineteen residents—yes, nineteen—at a Japanese nursing home stabbed to death in July 2016 by a 26-year-old man who had been hospitalized less than five months earlier for cannabis psychosis. Twenty-six other residents were wounded. According to a Japanese newspaper, the man told investigators he wanted to legalize marijuana and believed drug gangs were targeting him, so he had no choice but to “complete his mission.”
Do you want more cases? Because, unfortunately, there are plenty. The black tide of psychosis and the red tide of violence are rising together on a green wave, slow and steady and certain.
All anyone needs to do is look.