Santa Cruz, CA: Neither the severity nor leniency of marijuana laws play a significant role in influencing patterns or frequency of marijuana use among experienced users, according to a study published this week in the American Journal of Public Health.
The study, which compared the behavior of cannabis users in San Francisco and Amsterdam, “found consistent similarities in patterns of career use across different policy contexts,” including mean age of onset, frequency of use, quantity of use, intensity of intoxication, and duration of career use.
Buying and selling cannabis are permitted in Amsterdam in licensed “coffee shops,” and public use is permitted, whereas in San Francisco, buying, selling, and public use of marijuana for recreational purposes remain criminal offenses.
“If drug policies are a potent influence on user behavior, there should not be such strong similarities across such different drug control regimes,” authors concluded. “Our findings do not support claims that criminalization reduces cannabis use [or] that decriminalization increases cannabis use. Moreover, Dutch decriminalization does not appear to be associated with greater use of other illicit drugs relative to drug use in San Francisco, nor does criminalization in San Francisco appear to be associated with less use of other illicit drugs relative to their use in Amsterdam. Indeed, to judge from the lifetime prevalence of other illicit drug use, the reverse may be the case.”
NORML Foundation Executive Director Allen St. Pierre praised the study’s findings, noting that they mimic similar results commissioned by the US government which have found no greater use of marijuana in US states that have decriminalized its use compared to those that have not. “More than 30 percent of the US population lives under some form of marijuana decriminalization, and according to government and academic studies, these laws have not contributed to an increase in marijuana consumption nor negatively impacted adolescent attitudes toward drug use,” St. Pierre said.
“Enforcing marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers an estimated $10 billion annually and results in the arrest of approximately 700,000 individuals per year. Yet, study after study shows that this enforcement has little-to-no influence on individuals’ behavior. Rather, it is a tremendous waste of national and state criminal justice resources that should be focused on combating serious and violent crime. It invites government unnecessarily into areas of our private lives, and needlessly damages the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
For more information, please contact either Allen St. Pierre or Paul Armentano of the NORML Foundation at (202) 483-5500. Abstracts of the study, entitled “The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and in San Francisco,” are available online at:
http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/94/5/836