Healthcare providers in primary care, pediatrics, and the ED should be prepared to screen and educate families on cannabis use and the importance of safe storage in homes with children.One of the most dramatic shifts in public opinion in the U.S. over the past four and a half decades has been a surge in support for marijuana legalization, both medical and, increasingly, recreational. Currently 60% of adults in the U.S. favor broad-based marijuana legalization, compared to only 12% in 1969 , and nearly 90% think adults should be allowed to use marijuana for prescribed medical purposes . Despite this support, 44% indicate that they would be somewhat or very concerned if a “store that sold medical marijuana” opened in their area . In particular, many maintain that these stores, usually called dispensaries, attract or, even, cause crime . The idea that marijuana dispensaries attract crime has proved influential with policymakers. For example, an Oregon state senator argued that a law allowing cities to ban dispensaries was important to “empower them to protect our children and families” . In Los Angeles, the setting for this study, the city council cited crime in its 2010 decision to cap the number of dispensaries in the city.1 Yet, empirical evidence to support any link between marijuana dispensaries and crime is quite limited. State difference-in-differences estimates find no relationship between medical marijuana laws and crime rates . Since not all medical marijuana states have operational dispensaries, however, these estimates do not speak directly to the impact of dispensaries on crime. The density of dispensaries across 95 census tracts in Sacramento, CA is uncorrelated with either violent or property crime rates .2 Well-known limitations of cross-sectional analyses and a general lack of statistical power in that study suggest the importance of continued work on the topic. How, in theory, might medical marijuana dispensaries affect crime? First, marijuana use, trimming tray with screen which may be concentrated around dispensaries if some buyers consume onsite or nearby, may be criminogenic.
Similar effects have been cited for alcohol outlets, where openings and availability in Los Angeles and other jurisdictions are associated with increases in crime . In contrast to alcohol, however, some work suggests marijuana may not increase crime commission per se and may even inhibit aggressive behavior . Second, given the quasi-legal status of these stores and their products, dispensary customers, employees or owners may resort to violence to resolve disputes . If so, we might expect increases in crimes such as aggravated assault, which increased for such reasons with the emergence of crack cocaine . Third, crime could increase near dispensaries as individuals try to finance their purchases through the proceeds of crime . If so, we would expect theft or other property crimes to increase with dispensaries. Finally, marijuana users and the dispensaries they frequent, which are a direct source of drugs and cash, may offer opportunities that attract criminals. Anecdotal evidence suggests that dispensaries have been subject to break-ins and robberies . Thus, we would expect an increase in robbery and burglary around dispensaries. While these channels seem plausible and have captured public attention, dispensaries could, in principle, decrease crime. Dispensaries tend to have their own security systems and often security guards to protect their assets and resolve disputes. Analyses of business improvement districts find that private security can have large returns in terms of crimereduction . Likewise, if police allocate more patrols around dispensaries, they might reduce crime as in Di Tella and Schargrodsky . To the extent that dispensaries increase foot traffic through a neighborhood, they might prevent crime by increasing “eyes on the street” . In addition, by legitimizing the marijuana trade, actors in this market may have legal channels to resolve disputes. This last possibility is somewhat less plausible given the ambiguous legality of many aspects of the medical marijuana market, such as large scale distribution. Finally, if marijuana is a substitute for alcohol, as suggested by Anderson, Hansen and Rees and Crost and Rees , increased access to marijuana could reduce crime since drinking increases arrests for both property crime and violent crime . Ultimately, given the range of theoretical predictions, the impact of dispensaries on crime is an empirical question. To evaluate the claim that dispensaries attract or otherwise contribute to crime, we exploit a plausibly exogenous source of variation in dispensary activity – the temporary shutdown of medical marijuana dispensaries in the City of Los Angeles. On June 7, 2010, roughly 70% of the nearly 600 shops operating in the city of Los Angeles were ordered to close .
The shutdown came after years of concern and indecision over how to handle the burgeoning medical marijuana dispensary business in the city. In September 2007, the city adopted an “Interim Control Ordinance” , placing a temporary moratorium on new dispensaries and requiring existing dispensaries to register with the city by November 13, 2007 . Given the limited time that dispensaries had to submit a registration form along with the required city business tax registration certificate, registration was quite ad hoc. How the city would use the registrations was unclear and the market continued to grow for several years despite the moratorium. In January 2010, final regulations, including closure orders, were adopted. The new ordinance set the number of dispensaries in the city at 70. Dispensaries that had registered between September and November 2007 and had been operating legally since that time were grandfathered, meaning that the number of legal dispensaries in the city could exceed 70 in the short run. Consistent with the seeming arbitrariness of the closure criteria, we find that dispen-saries ordered to close and those allowed to remain open look similar on observable dimensions. In other words, closure orders were not correlated with observable dispensary characteristics that might have otherwise made them of specific interest to law enforcement. We leverage the quasi-random nature of closure orders using a difference-in-differences framework and detailed data on exact dispensary locations and crime reports by city block to compare daily crime counts within varying radii around dispensaries ordered to close and those allowed to remain open. If dispensaries attract crime, then crime should decrease around dispensaries subject to closure relative to those allowed to remain open.6 Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find no evidence that closures decreased crime. Instead, we find a significant relative increase in crime around closed dispensaries. Like compliance with the closures orders themselves, which first was high, fell off with legal challenges and collapsed after a December 2010 injunction , the increase in crime is temporary. Relative crime rates return to normal within four weeks. The increase is also very local – the estimated crime effects decrease rapidly and monotonically with distance around dispensaries. Bearing in mind that our analysis captures short-run effects, these findings imply that closing medical marijuana dispensaries is unlikely to reduce crime. Although there may be a myriad of reasons to regulate the number of marijuana dispensaries, protection from crime is one that seems difficult to substantiate. First, we analyze crime by categories. We find that the increase in crime is strongest and most precise for the type of crime most plausibly deterred by the presence of bystanders – property crime and theft from vehicles, specifically. Second, we analyze the interaction between closures and neighborhood foot traffic. We proxy for foot traffic using Walk Scores, trim tray for weed a proprietary measure that scores each address based on the walking time to amenities, population density, block length and the density of street intersections. We find that the the magnitude of the crime effect varies in a non-linear way with Walk Scores. Specifically, the magnitude of the closure effect varies negatively with walk ability, except in the mostgeographically isolated areas for which closures have no measurable effect on crime.
To shed further light on mechanisms, we explore the generalizability of the findings. Specifically, we analyze the impact of temporary restaurant closures due to public health code violations on crime in Los Angeles County. Despite the very different nature of these businesses, the reason for and timing of their closures, and the identifying assumptions, we find a nearly identical pattern of results. Crime increases in the local neighborhood around closed restaurants, the increase is driven by property crime, the effect is concentrated in areas without a high volume of foot traffic, and the effect disappears as soon as the restaurant reopens. The common pattern of results for dispensaries and restaurants suggests that business closures in general exert a significant negative crime externality. By extension, businesses offer very local protection against some types of crime. Given that police are unlikely to systematically change their behavior in response to temporary restaurant closures, this analysis further suggests that changes in policing cannot explain the common pattern of results. Rather, a likely common mechanism may be “eyes upon the street” , meaning that the presence of individuals helps deter crime. While part of the canon of modern urban design and crime prevention, this theory is virtually unsupported by rigorous empirical evidence. In addition, Jane Jacob’s original 1961 formulation of the hypothesis makes clear that the impact of additional individuals on local crime is theoretically ambiguous; crowds provide some form of natural policing but also more perpetrators of and opportunities for crime. Our findings suggest that the first channel dominates, at least in the case of medical marijuana dispensaries and restaurants in urban environments. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we discuss the June 2010 closure of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles and describe our data. In section 3 we describe our analytic approach for the dispensary analysis. In section 4 we present our main results. In section 5 we discuss spatial and temporal displacement. In section 6 we presents the institutional details of and results from our analysis of temporary restaurant closures due to health code violations in Los Angeles County. In section 7 we explore potential mechanisms behind the shared pattern of findings. In section 8 we conclude.In 1996, voters in California approved Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law. Marijuana dispensaries opened to serve the patients newly qualified to use the drug under the law. Like the state as a whole, the City of Los Angeles saw rapid growth in dispensaries after the 2004 passage of a bill that clarified several operational aspects of the state’s medical marijuana law. At its peak, some estimates put the number of dispensaries in the City of Los Angeles at over 800 . Not all Los Angeles residents welcomed these stores. Many believed that dispensaries attract crime and law enforcement fueled these concerns. In a July 2005 report, the LAPD cited several felony narcotics arrests made at dispensaries and speculated that “crimes such as theft, robbery and assault have occurred and will occur along with the sale of marijuana from these locations.” As a result, they called for restricting dispensaries to commercial areas in the city if not banning them outright.8 A later report by the Los Angeles Police Commission argued that the increase in dispensaries within the city was tied to an increase in crime in reporting districts that had received complaints about dispensaries.9 While these crime changes were not compared to that around other businesses or areas, many found the argument persuasive. In 2006, the City Attorney’s Office laid out options for regulating dispensaries – a land use ordinance establishing zoning requirements, an interim moratorium until state law was ”further clarified” or an outright ban. Almost a year later, in September 2007, the city adopted an “Interim Control Ordinance” that temporarily banned new dispensaries and required existing ones to register with the city by November 13, 2007. The ICO aimed to pacify constituents concerned with the growth of dispensaries while the city drafted permanent legislation. While in principle the ICO should have stopped the growth in dispensaries, in practice it had the opposite effect. Hundreds of dispensaries opened after the moratorium by filing applications for “hardship exemptions” allowed under the ICO . The large number of applicants stemmed in part from the recognition that the city would not prosecute dispensaries until their hardship applications had been reviewed and that the city council was in no hurry to review applications. By June 2009, when the city council first began to rule on the hardship exemption applications, over 500 applications had been submitted . On June 19, 2009, the city passed an ordinance amending the ICO to eliminate the hardship exemption.