COVID hit Colorado in 2020 and forced most of the state to shut down entirely. During this time, mental health trends decreased, and substance abuse, especially weed in Colorado, became more resistant. I was curious If the cannabis sales were affected because of the pandemic. My overall query is do counties with the highest number of sales from cannabis in 2020 have more related covid deaths?
I was curious if the consumption of cannabis increased noticeably during the pandemic. Boulder is a college town where many students suffer from substance abuse. I fear the pandemic has just made it worse. I examined cannabis sales and how they changed from 2019 to when the pandemic occurred in 2020 for Boulder.
I initially wanted to look at trends within the sales of cannabis. From the table, the number of sales has increased over the years. There have been no years where the number of deals decreased. Colorado Government legalized cannabis recreationally in 2014. The sales double into the following year. We see the most significant change in sales from 2014 to 2015. The total Colorado sales increased by $259,653,068. The sales grow and reach a million by 2917. From 2019 to 2020, the total Colorado sales increased by $168,231,289. This is not as large of growth, but it still is a super high steady rise in sales. I thought I would have seen more of a spike from personal experience with friends in college. However, Boulder makes it to the top 10 spenders for cannabis sales with the following table. This could be the increase I was anticipating.
I looked into the individual counties' sales. Denver, Arapahoe, and Boulder County are the top three counties with the highest sales. Denver County has a population of 717,632, so it makes sense the sales are so high. It is wild to see how increased it is than the other counties. Arapahoe has a population of 655,044, just a little less than Denver but less than half the sale revenue. Boulder has a population of 330,860, significantly less than Denver and Arapahoe. This is because Boulder is a college town known for its hippy culture. I will use these ten different counties to analyze them because they have the highest sales in Colorado.
I further explored Boulder to see how the sales have increased over the years. The numbers have been growing by around 11 million per year for the last couple of years. I am still surprised there is not a super prominent peak for 2019–2021. I tried to zoom into the three years to see if I missed anything.
I was curious if the consumption of cannabis increased noticeably during the pandemic. Boulder is a college town where many students suffer from substance abuse. I fear the pandemic has just made it worse. I examined cannabis sales and how they changed from 2019 to when the pandemic occurred in 2020 for Boulder. Although my scales struggle the overall message is clear, cannabis sales in Boulder continue to increase at a steady pace. To show a zoomed-in look, I explored the total sales for each month within 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The cannabis sales in 2019, 2020, and 2021 all have the highest sales during the second half of the year. The month of July is when sales are the highest in Boulder for 2020 and 2021. 2019’s highest month was August and the second highest was July. I think the peaks might have occurred because students were coming back to Boulder for the Fall semester. People who don't live in a legal state and smoke most likely visited the dispensaries ASAP.
Many researchers believe that cannabis use is at a historic high for teenagers and young adults. During this time, most dispensaries offered curbside pickup to minimize the spread of COVID. People need to leave their houses to purchase the product which makes them more exposed to COVID. I am curious how effective curbside pickup was. To reframe, do counties with high revenue/sales from cannabis have higher COVID cases and death rates from COVID?
I calculated the percentage of deaths from COVID for the top 10 counties, from the previous sales charts, in Colorado in 2020. I created a new column within the data frame to show a percentage of the number of deaths from COVID within the County. Adams and Pueblo county has a higher rate of deaths related to COVID. Surprisingly, Denver has a higher percentage because it has the highest population.
The total number of covid deaths per County is way smaller than the total amount of cases. This can make it hard to compare the two because they have different scales. Denver, Arapahoe, Adams, and Jefferson County all have a high number of infected with COVID. This makes sense because of how condensed and the number of people in a city area. Looking back, I wish I had compared the total cases with population through a graph; I think the scale might be easier to read. It is interesting that Las Animas (small county / low population) had few cases but was one of the top counties for cannabis sales. I think that population is the most influential factor when looking at any of these statistics for the County. I can't fully gauge the next significant factor from just the data (an example is Boulder is a college town, so, therefore, more students and substance abuse).
Reflecting on my initial inquiry: "Do counties with high revenue/sales from cannabis have higher COVID cases and death rates from COVID?" For the most part, yes. But it mostly has to do with the population factor; highly populated counties have a higher amount of revenue and overall population size, so the number of cases should also be higher. Boulder is super interesting because of its high contribution to its cannabis sales.
