Developing Methods for Assessing Outcomes of Law and Policy on Drug Trafficking Offenders, Organizations, and Criminal Justice Responses, United States, 2000-2018

This project sought to gather and analyze data on the effects of marijuana legalization from primary and secondary data sources that are both local and national in scope, and at both the individual and aggregate level. Since 1996, 37 states have passed statutes legalizing marijuana for medical and/or recreational use, while it has remained illegal under federal law. Jurisdictional and temporal variation in law creates a complex environment and substantial challenges for police and prosecutors charged with enforcement, and little is known about the justice system processing, public safety, and public health outcomes of evolving laws and policies.
Secondary criminal justice and public health data were gathered from federal, state, and local sources. Each source has a sufficiently long time series to provide statistical power and to allow for sometimes gradual implementation. The design exploits geographic and temporal variation in the implementation of marijuana law, using a difference-in-differences design that compares outcomes in states which implemented the policies with states that did not, before and after implementation.