COVID-19 A Sobering Reality
When the lockdowns were first implemented they gave people a new outlook on free time as many people who regularly worded 9–5 now had what seemed like unlimited free time to do whatever they wanted. Many people began new hobbies or continued old ones that fizzled out from the chaotic lifestyle that is adulting. But like all good things in this world, there must be a catch, many people including me were stressed out about this pandemic that would eventually snowball into something we haven’t seen since the Spanish Flu. So in times of uncertainty like this it seems that it would be expected that recreational cannabis sales would have increased drastically in legal states. This curiosity in me turned into a desire to know how much cannabis sales have increased or decreased since the beginning of the pandemic. In my head it had just made sense, more people staying home and not working equates to more people smoking recreational cannabis. So I wanted to add some validity to my theory.
To conduct this analysis I first needed to obtain data sources that would be able to produce sufficient evidence that recreational cannabis sales increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to narrow my search down, not every state in the United States has legal weed so it seemed necessary to focus on individual cities. My home city Denver Colorado seemed like the best place to look at because Colorado especially has a fully developed cannabis market as marijuana has been legal for almost ten years at the beginning of the pandemic.
Now that the sources have been obtained I needed to figure out the right and best want to analyze my data. After a simple analysis of the raw data of COVID cases and cannabis sales, I determined that the best way to go about this is to compare by month the mean of cannabis sales and the mean of COVID-19 cases for Denver CO. Using some sick python skills I was able to create pivot tables and histograms comparing side by side mean cannabis sales and COVID-19 cases monthly. I chose to create histograms as a histogram can allow a viewer to identify trends or patterns with ease and this data is being represented over a span of a year so I want to make sure that just by looking at the data I can form a conclusion from the data.
My results shattered my hypothesis. Comparing the two histograms side by side had show that when COVID-19 cases increased cannabis sales had more or less decreased. This was most evident in November, October, and December of 2021, where the daily count of mean cases hit a max of almost 1,600 cases per day. Meanwhile, cannabis sales during that same three-month stretch in 2021 had dropped from a mean average of about 400 million per month to 340 million per month. Meanwhile, max recreation cannabis sales occurred from late April to early May with a mean of 500 million per month. During that same time in late April to early May COVID-19 cases were averaging 600 mean cases in April and only 200 mean cases in May! To get some hard evidence I needed to calculate the correlation between the two which to my surprise was -0.6. A -0.6 correlation means that these two variables had a somewhat significant relationship where one variable increased and the other decreased.
I was flabbergasted, not only was my hypothesis inaccurate it was flat-out the opposite of what happened. As COVID-19 cases decreased cannabis sales increased and vice-versa. These are the last two variables that I would have believed to have a significant negative correlation. For my next steps, I would want to learn why this negative correlation occurred. This could be a result of numerous other factors like maybe when there is an increase in COVID-19 cases people did not want to go out and have contact with people, it is no surprise that many businesses were hurt due to lockdowns and increases in the number of COVID-19 cases. There is too much unknown for me to conclude at this moment. All we can say right now is that COVID-19 was truly a sobering reality.
