The Criminogenic Effect of Marijuana Dispensaries

Posted by Peter Smith on December 20th, 2019

The study analyzed the criminogenic effect of legalizing recreational marijuana dispensaries in Denver. Street segments with recreational dispensaries experienced no changes in violent, disorder and drug crime but did experience an 18% increase in property crime, and street segments adjacent to recreational dispensaries experienced some notable (but non-significant) drug and disorder crime increases. Medical dispensaries demonstrated no significant crime changes. A cost-benefit analysis found the associated crime costs were largely offset by sales revenue. Monetary benefits were much less pronounced, and barely cost effective, when only considering tax revenue.

Despite theoretical arguments situating dispensaries as criminogenic, research has found that marijuana legalization and the opening of marijuana dispensaries does not significantly affect national crime rates in the UK (Braakman & Jones, 2014) or US (Dragone, Prarolo, Vanin, & Zanella, 2018). Findings have also emerged suggesting that medical marijuana legalization in the states bordering Mexico led to a reduction in violent crime (Gavrilova, Kamada, & Zoutman, 2017), and property crime reductions were observed at the state-level following medical legalization (Huber III, Newman, & LaFave, 2016). In some original state-level research on legalization and crime, Morris et al. (2014) concluded that medical marijuana dispensaries had no effect on crime at the state-level and one of the first quasi-experimental study’s to test state-level criminogenic effects of recreational marijuana legalization in Washington State and Colorado also found that marijuana legalization had a non-significant effect on both property and violent crimes (Lu et al., 2019).

Studies examining the relationship between dispensaries and crime at lower spatial extents, like the neighborhood level, have also yielded sparse evidence of a criminogenic effect. Kepple and Freisthler (2012) found that medical marijuana dispensary density in Sacramento, CA had no effect on crime at the census tract level, with a later replication study of medical marijuana dispensaries at the block group level by Freisthler, Ponicki, Gaidus, and Gruenewald (2016) generating similar results. However, at the block group level, Contreras (2017) conducted a study on medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, CA and determined that medical dispensaries generated an increase in crime rates in the block groups with medical dispensaries.

Although dispensaries are stationary, their criminogenic influence may produce spatial effects on crime beyond their immediate location, a phenomenon that has been previously observed with alcohol outlets (Wheeler, 2018). It then follows that there may be an observable crime increase in the nearby areas that is driven by the mobility of offenders and targets in the immediate built environment and exacerbated by the displacement of crime as a result of dispensary security measures. The conclusions produced by assessing adjacent neighborhood level units has created further conflict in the body of evidence, with Freisthler et al. (2016) finding that higher densities of medical marijuana dispensaries in Long Beach, CA corresponded with increased rates of violent and property crime in the adjacent block groups.