Does Colorado Want to Make Marijuana Illegal Again
Colorado governor won't dominion out banning marijuana once again. Here'southward why
Updated 2200 GMT (0600 HKT) April 20, 2018
Whether the two are connected is hotly debated -- and if they are, and then what? For the outset fourth dimension publicly, Hickenlooper told CNN he doesn't dominion out recriminalizing recreational marijuana, fifty-fifty if that'south a long shot.
"Trust me, if the data was coming back and we saw spikes in vehement criminal offense, we saw spikes in overall law-breaking, there would be a lot of people looking for that bottle and figuring out how we go the genie back in," he said. "It doesn't seem likely to me, but I'm not ruling it out."
Data is now coming back. In 2016, the state'south criminal offense charge per unit was upward 5% compared with 2013, while the national trend was downward. Violent crime went upwardly 12.five% in the same fourth dimension while the national increase was less than 5%. But Hickenlooper isn't withal ready to pin the blame on the legalization of weed -- a step he opposed but has since embraced as the option of his constituents.
"This is i of the slap-up social experiments of the concluding 100 years. Nosotros take to all proceed an open mind," he said.
Conflicting interpretations
Denver, the country'southward uppercase and largest city, is home to the lion'south share of Colorado's recreational marijuana dispensaries. It has more than 170 of them -- more than the number of Starbucks, McDonald's and 7-Eleven stores combined.
Since 2013, Denver has seen its crime spike, too; the 2016 crime rate increased four%, with violent criminal offence up 9%.
The Denver Constabulary say the data is inconclusive.
"[Property crime is] the biggest driver of our [overall] offense, and of our increases. And so, can you attribute that to marijuana? I don't think you can," said Denver Police force Commander James Henning. "The data isn't there."
The force has added more officers to police force the illicit weed market that Henning says continues to grow.
Merely, Henning said, in that location is plenty of grey area when it comes to cataloging crimes that may or may not have a nexus to marijuana -- legal or otherwise.
"If a marijuana clinic is burglarized, is that considering information technology was a marijuana clinic or ... if it were a liquor store or a stereo shop would it have been burglarized as well?" he said. "The data is then tough to smash down and say this law-breaking happened because of marijuana. Information technology'southward just almost impossible to do that."
Two years ago, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock blamed legal marijuana for drawing people to a pedestrian mall downtown where vehement incidents were happening. In one case, a transient swung a PVC pipe at people nearby. Police force did not allocate that crime as "marijuana related."
In Fort Collins, Larimer Canton Sheriff Justin Smith is one of the few law enforcement leaders in the state to publicly blame legal marijuana for rise crime.
He doesn't claim that smoking a joint makes you more than likely to rob a bank. The connection between cannabis and crime is often indirect -- and not captured by official statistics, he said.
"Information technology's not a causal thing," he said, arguing instead that legal weed is alluring a growing seasonal transient population -- a population that he said is more likely to commit criminal offence. "Every third inmate in the [Larimer County] jail is a transient and y'all go by and ask them, and they'll tell yous, we came here because of marijuana."
Smith -- a longtime opponent of legal weed who once led a lawsuit confronting Colorado's legalization -- also said the theory that legalization would end the black market in marijuana has not been borne out.
"That was one of the big promises [of legalizing marijuana] that if you regulated it, y'all would get rid of the problems that had traditionally been in that location with the illegal grows, but it's been actually the opposite," he said.
Mason Tvert, a well-known pro-marijuana activist, sees things very differently, arguing information technology'southward irresponsible to even suggest there's a connexion between rising crime and marijuana without difficult evidence to prove the link.
"The only story here is that the bear witness does not show marijuana or marijuana legalization are to blame for this increment in crime," he said.
Did marijuana bring a killer to town?
Smith's frustration reached a boiling bespeak terminal summertime when the body of 23-yr-old Helena Hoffmann was pulled out of a lake in Fort Collins. Police said she had been raped and murdered walking home from an overnight shift at a nearby McDonald's. The man convicted in the case, Jeffrey Etheridge, is just the kind of person Smith is alert against.
Etheridge is a registered sex offender from Kentucky. From jail, he told CNN that he moved to Colorado in 2017 with his and then-girlfriend considering her brother worked at a marijuana dispensary. At the fourth dimension of his arrest he was a transient, living out of his car in the park where Hoffmann's torso was constitute. Etheridge pleaded guilty but at present says he is innocent.
Hoffmann left backside a then-iv-year-old girl named Mary, at present being raised by her male parent, Zach Denton.
"I remember Mary looking at us, and she goes 'did my mom die?' and that'southward really when it set in," Denton said nigh the day he bankrupt the news of Hoffmann'south death to his daughter.
He said Hoffmann would not want all homeless or transient people blamed for issues caused by simply a few.
Denton thinks the bigger upshot is that Etheridge, an out-of-land sex offender, was able to annals his overnight address as Fort Collins' City Park, a place that is supposed to close at 11 p.grand. and attracts children who come up to play and swim.
From a bench in Metropolis Park built in remembrance of Hoffmann, Denton said there's a lot that could alter: sex offender laws, transient laws, or fifty-fifty the rules on park access at night. Whatever does modify, he said, will be Hoffmann's legacy.
In downtown Denver, the large -- and growing -- homeless population ofttimes gathers in Civic Center Park, side by side to the Statehouse.
The state's rate of homelessness rose 5.iii% from 2013 to 2017, according to data from the Us Department of Housing and Urban Evolution. Nationally, the charge per unit of homelessness dropped 8.vi% in the aforementioned flow.
Tom Luehrs, the executive director of Denver'south St. Francis Centre homeless shelter, said he sees many people who came to Colorado hoping to work in the legal marijuana manufacture, merely to find out it'southward not that piece of cake. But he said there is some other, smaller, group of seasonal transient people who seem to prefer life on the streets to an apartment and a job. While their presence predates marijuana legalization, it has increased since it became legal, he said.
"A lot of the people that nosotros work with are wanting to become jobs, wanting to get housing, wanting to move out of homelessness, and so then you lot have this other group that's kind of even argumentative and certainly not engaging and sometimes just very disrespectful. They don't care," Luehrs said.
Hickenlooper is skeptical that legal weed is to blame for increasing the homeless population.
"Nosotros're trying to get data on it. That'southward a hard one to measure," he said.
The need for existent information
The lack of solid evidence i mode or another weighs on Hickenlooper, who can betoken to other things that accept changed since legalization on January 1, 2014 -- like an economic hot streak -- without existence able to say exactly what impact that has had.
"When you lot have that kind of [economical] growth, yous attract all kinds of people and a lot of them are unsavory. Practice they come up for the marijuana? Or do they come because at that place are so many immature people coming, there'due south a lot of money in the community and this is a nifty place to try and rob somebody? Again, more than information. More than data is the simply mode nosotros're going to effigy this out," he said.
That was his advice to California lawmakers last year ahead of that state'due south legalization of recreational marijuana.
"Spend the money to get a proficient baseline so that you can assistance guide the discussions and the real facts around this huge transformational shift in the way we address marijuana," he told CNN, explaining his bulletin to lawmakers.
Case in indicate: Colorado's traffic fatalities where the driver tested positive for the active course of THC known every bit Delta nine more than than quadrupled from 18 in 2013 to 77 in 2016, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation. But those numbers are likely very misleading, because, co-ordinate to Hickenlooper, the state didn't often test for marijuana in fatal crashes prior to legalization.
"That's not existent data," he said. "Nosotros didn't apply to measure it and at present we're trying to measure something, and so of course we run into a lot more than."
If and when the data does come up in -- from Colorado, from California and elsewhere -- it will be studied intensively. And if the haze clears and there are strong signals that state legalization has hurt the customs, Hickenlooper said Colorado's legal marijuana experiment may have to end.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/20/us/colorado-marijuana-and-crime/index.html
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