How Does the Legalization of Cannabis Actually Change Crime Statistics?
When given the opportunity to create a story using a variety of provided data files, I thought it would be interesting to combine the Colorado County Cannabis Sales dataset with the Colorado Crime dataset and start my story from there. Historically, I’ve found an argument provided by those against the legalization of Marijuana is that they believe it will encourage more distribution of other kinds of drugs. I’ve personally never believed that myself, and realized after reading the data over that I now have an actual means of testing that hypothesis. I asked the question “Did the legalization of Marijuana in Colorado raise or lower the amount of both drug/narcotics violations and drug equipment violations? My hypothesis was that after the legalization of marijuana in the state both drug equipment, as well as drug and narcotic violations would both lower because I believed that the most common kind of drug related crimes were cannabis. I thought that once cannabis was legalized, people would feel comfortable buying it legally and therefore lower crime statistics regarding drug charges. The reason this is an issue is because in other states where Marijuana has not been legalized, people are being arrested on heavier drug charges when they’re just trying to obtain cannabis. I wanted to see if I could show a visual statistical difference in proportionately how the legalization of Cannabis has affected these statistics.
My research was conducted by downloading a CSV file titled ‘co_county_crimes’, as well as a zip file named ‘co_cannabis_sales’ that ultimately had to be unzipped to retrieve the data. I opened both files and formatted them into data frames so they would be easier to read. The county crime file contained data from four different types of crimes, separated by both county and year. The four types of crime were crimes against person, crimes against property, drug equipment violations and finally drug/narcotic violations. I knew I only wanted to use the later two for my analysis, so I created a smaller data frame that still had the county and year but only contained drug equipment violations and drug/narcotic violations. Regarding the sales data, that was organized by month, year and county similarly to the prior dataset. However, it included data for both sales for medical purposes as well as recreational purposes. I combined those numbers, and aggregated the data into another table where I organized it by year, county, and overall sales from that year. My first dataset, the crime one, went as far back as 2008 while the cannabis sales data set only started in 2014. I then combined both datasets into one larger dataset that included statistics on both sales and crimes that happened in each year as well as county. This gave me an interesting and insightful look at the generalized numbers, but there was a lot of data there and I wanted to be able to track the differences in violations as well as sales.
I created two larger tables, one for drug equipment violations while the other tracked drug/narcotic violations. In each I added two new columns which allowed me to calculate the difference in both violations and sales, which I named respectively “New Sales” and “New Violations”. This brought me closer to ultimately what I was hoping to find, and all I had to do next was pull out data from specific counties, so I could get a comprehensive picture as to the difference in violations per county. I chose Adams county, Boulder county, and Arapahoe county. I chose these three because the first two were near the top of the data set so I naturally wanted to see what those would look like. I chose Boulder because I go to university here, and I wanted to see what my own town’s results looked like. I created 6 different tables for each county, one focusing on drug/narcotic violations while the other showing drug equipment violations, and I was able to see how those numbers increased and decreased in the new violations column.
The results proved to be insanely interesting. Regarding Boulder county, in 2012 there were 1,165 drug/narcotic violations and 1,038 drug equipment violations. However, in 2013 there were only 774 drug/narcotic violations and 464 drug equipment violations. In 2014, where our sales data actually begins, there were 56,172,236 total cannabis sales in Boulder, while there were also 726 drug/narcotic violations and 481 drug equipment violations. I thought this was a little strange how there was such a large drop in violations in 2013, but not as much in 2014 once the sales numbers were actually visible. I wanted to see why that may have been, and what I found both confirmed my hypothesis and explained both the lack of sales data and massive drop in violations. In late 2012, Colorado passed amendment 64 to the Colorado Constitution, legalizing marijuana for those over 21 years of age. Shops may have not been recording as diligently within that first year of legalization, or may have still been setting up dispensaries around the state which could explain the lack of data for sales. However, the date of legalization explains completely why there were 574 less drug equipment violations and 421 less drug/narcotic related violations in Boulder during 2013, the year after.
The provided data confirmed my hypothesis that the legalization of cannabis in Colorado would lead to the number of drug/narcotic violations and drug equipment violations decreasing as a whole. These are only the numbers for Colorado, imagine if this was done nationally and the decrease in violation numbers nationally. Granted, if I were to have done this differently than I would have loved to use more data pulling from more states than just Colorado on a national scale to get an even more holistic picture. However, even with the provided data, it shows that less people would be incarcerated from the legalization of cannabis without drug related crime increasing.
