SabetWatch: Colorado Cannabis Crime

My homeboy Kevin Sabet is at it again. He dropped this tweet about an article on medical marijuana dispensaries and crime, and I salivated:

BREAKING: NBC reports doubling of annual robbery and burglary rate from med marijuana stores since 2009 in Coloradohttp://t.co/1l98ihvziC

— Kevin Sabet (@KevinSabet) February 5, 2014

The anti-pot crowd loves to spread word that legal pot only opens the door to more crime. Well, I think that is true, to a point. With state laws making the use and sale of weed legal, of course more and more dispensaries will open and the market will grow. Bigger markets means more bottom-feeding fish (criminals) will show up too. However, with banking and security services largely denied by a specious cannabis scheduling, the legal pot industry finds itself in the unique and unpleasant position of being fully exposed and totally unprotected.

Crime happens also due to limited hubs wherein all the pot and money are bound to gather. This would be happening with liquor if it was only available in a handful of places as well. Fully legal weed would eventually grow to be as ubiquitous and easy to find as a beer and when is the last time you saw an article about someone tunneling under the floor to get alcohol? It is the simple economics of supply and demand. When weed is able to be found at a convenience store and banks are allowed to offer secure financial services, the number of high-profile crime associated with it will go down.

This is just another example of the prohibitionist posse painting the symptom as the problem. Crime is not new to the pot industry, but we can reduce its severity. You will never eliminate crime. Petty crime happens every day in every state in the nation. Also, the amount of dispensaries has likely far more than doubled since 2009. So, if robberies have only doubled while the number of dispensaries has skyrocketed, can we not look at that as a net reduction in burglaries? That’s like looking at two towns, one with 100 people and one with 10,000 people and saying that the town with 10,000 has loose morals because they have more unwed mothers and teen pregnancy. While the larger town does have a higher amount of actual teen moms (or whatever), removing that from the context of population size is a very misleading way to report data. As a caveat, I am struggling to find any clear, authoritative data that shows the number of CO dispensaries over time since 2009. So, I may be off about that.

Regardless, legal weed is not what is bringing the criminal element to the industry. When pot farmers had to hide in forests and guard their crops with dogs and guns, robberies and worse still happened. I would wager they happened more often and with greater severity, but they don’t often get reported in the same way when it was believed that criminals were attacking criminals. The problem is top-down. If the federal classification of marijuana was brought into alignment with the truth, pot shops would be more prevalent and they would no longer have to be cash-only businesses that are well-known lighthouses for robbery.

Furthermore, many of my arguments above are also argued in the source article from which Sabet draws his attention-grabbing headline. The federal classification of cannabis is what is keeping banks from working with them as legitimate businesses so they are forced to keep cash on hand. Open up the same offers of secure banking and insurance that are offered to any other legit business and give cannabis an honest shot.

Keep tossing out your bullshit, Kevin. I promise I will stay on your ass and (attempt to) keep you honest.