I am curious to see if there was an increase or decrease in either drug related crimes or drug equipment violations across Colorado’s counties after the legalization of Marijuana in November 2012. What persuaded me to ask this question was the common thought that many have in states which have yet to legalize Marijuana is that legalization will lead to a decrease in drug related crime as it will become a regulated industry that can provide the state with additional tax revenue. The data set I will be analyzing contains annual drug and narcotic violation data for each of Colorado’s 64 counties for the years 2008 through 2020. I will be focusing on 5 specific counties in this analysis: Boulder county, Larimer County, Denver county, Summit County and Gunnison County. My reasoning for choosing these 5 counties is due to the fact they represent the different types of populations living in Colorado. Boulder and Larimer county both have large populations of college aged students due to the University of Colorado and Colorado State University residing in both of these counties. I expect that both of these counties will have drug violation trends different than Denver, Summit and Gunnison due to their demographic differences. My reasoning for analyzing Denver county is that it’s the largest metropolitan area in the state, being home to the state capitol Denver. Next I analyzed Summit county which is home to the mountain resort town of Breckenridge, this area of Colorado is unique due to the fact that while it is rural, a vast majority of the property owners in this county live in other areas for the majority of the year. Finally I choose Gunnison County due to its rural population that typically lives there year round.
The average number of drug and narcotic related violations in Boulder county during the time period 2008–2020 was 940 a year, with the minimum number of violations in a year being 542 and the highest number of violations being 1402 in a single year. Interestingly enough, 2008 was the year that recorded the lowest amount of drug and narcotic related violations in Boulder county and 2018 being the year with the highest amount of violations. To me this is interesting due to the fact that when I set off exploring this data set I expected to find that drug and narcotic related violations to decrease after the legalization of marijuana. A plot I created visualizes how in the years leading up to 2012 there was a year after year increase in drug violations in Boulder county, with a steady decrease until 2014, where there’s another large spike until 2018. 2020 had the lowest level of violations since 2020, which I suspect is due to the large number of college students that were sent home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Again, going against my initial prediction of drug violations decreasing after the legalization of recreational marijuana Denver county saw an initial drop off in the years leading up to 2012 and a large spike from 2012–2019, with yet again another large decrease in 2020 which I expect is the result of more people staying in doors during the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. The trend in Larimer county was incredibly similar to Boulder county, with there being a spike leading up to legalization in 2012 followed by an even larger increase until 2019 and a sharp drop off in 2020. Despite there being a drop off in 2020 it is not as severe as Boulder County’s.
Moving onto the more rural counties, Gunnison and Summit we find that there was a significant decrease in drug and narcotic violations following the legalization of marijuana, with Summit county having 30.99% of the drug violations in 2019 that it did in 2009. Gunnison County’s level of drug and narcotic related violations fell to just 56.25% in 2019 of what they were in 2009. When looking at the more urban areas of Denver, Boulder and Larimer county we find that there was a significant increase in drug and narcotic related violations in the period 2009–2019. Denver counties level of drug and narcotic violations in 2019 was 216.29% higher than 2009. Boulder continues this trend of increasing levels of drug related violations following legalization with levels in 2019 being 166.61% higher than they were in 2009 and finally Larimer county’s increase being in between Boulder and Denver counties with 2019 levels being 200.49% higher than those in 2009.
What we find from looking at these 5 counties is that the more urban centers of Larimer, Boulder and Denver experienced an increase in narcotics related violations whilst the more rural areas of Gunnison and Summit experienced a significant decrease. One constant across all observed counties was a significant decrease in 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic.
