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Legal Marijuana Is A ‘Positive Amenity’ For New Colorado Residents, Study Finds

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Many people consider a number of factors before deciding to move to a new state, including the availability of jobs, the quality of schools and the cost of living, among other things. In recent years, another amenity that may attract new residents to a state, according to a recent study, is access to legal marijuana.

Specifically, researchers focused on the number of people who migrated to Colorado before and after legalization as compared with a model of what the state would look like under continued prohibition.

“We find strong evidence,” the paper states, “that potential migrants view legalized marijuana as a positive amenity with in-migration significantly higher in Colorado compared with synthetic-Colorado after the writing of the [Department of Justice] memo in October 2009 that effectively allowed state laws already in place to be activated, and additionally after marijuana was legalized in 2013 for recreational use.”

The findings, which were published in the journal Economic Inquiry last month, are “consistent with most previous research that has in general found positive effects of legalization, such as reductions in youth suicide, traffic accidents and crime.”

Researchers in Spain and Italy used data from the American Community Survey to track how many people moved within the United States, including where they lived originally and where they migrated. To understand how local laws may help entice newcomers to an area, they focused primarily on Colorado, which legalized medical cannabis in 2000 and adult-use marijuana in 2012. For comparison purposes, they created a “synthetic Colorado” using data from 20 states where marijuana was still illegal in 2017 with a goal of creating a synthetic model of a Colorado that had not legalized marijuana.

Because legal access to medical cannabis was not widely available until after 2009—the year the Obama Department of Justice issued guidelines that made enforcement of federal law a low priority for individuals operating in compliance with state medical cannabis laws—the study’s authors focused on the years 2010–2015 as the treatment period in their analysis. They compared migration numbers for 2005–2009 as the pretreatment period.

“From 2005 to 2009, on average, 187,600 people migrated to Colorado in each year,” the study states. “Between 2010 and 2013, in-migration increased by 21,372 people per year (a 11.4% increase) in Colorado compared with synthetic-Colorado. After full legalization in 2013, in-migration further increased by 14,087 people per year (an additional 7.5% increase).”

“When we employ permutation methods to assess the statistical likelihood of our results given our sample, we find that Colorado is a clear and significant outlier,” the researchers wrote. “We find no evidence for significant changes in out-migration from Colorado relative to synthetic-Colorado suggesting that marijuana legalization did not change the equilibrium for individuals already living in the state.”

Overall, the authors write, 156,406 more people moved to Colorado after 2009 than what was predicted using their synthetic-Colorado analysis. “Given that we find no impact on outmigration, this implies that marijuana legalization increased Colorado’s population by 3.2% as of 2015.”

Their findings support the results of a related paper published in 2018. That analysis found that legalization in Colorado lead to a 6 percent increase in housing values, which were driven by an increase in demand.

“Taken together,” the current study states, “this suggests that, at least initially, easier access as opposed to the generation of new jobs and local tax revenues, was the main driver of migration inflows to Colorado.”

Colorado Has Generated Over $1 Billion In Marijuana Revenue, State Announces

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Kimberly Lawson is a former altweekly newspaper editor turned freelance writer based in Georgia. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, O magazine, Broadly, Rewire.News, The Week and more.

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