Don’t believe industry-backed advocates who argue that laws and policies restricting access to marijuana harm society. All the available evidence shows the opposite: The legalization, commercialization, and normalization of marijuana increase crime and invites foreign drug cartels into the country.
We’ve all heard the arguments from the marijuana industry: It’s the laws keeping the drug federally illegal that create a crime crisis around it. Therefore, the sooner the US federally legalizes the drug, the sooner the black markets—and the associated violence and disorder—will go away. In the meantime, states must act to develop their own legal programs.
Sadly, everything we actually know about the legalization of marijuana points in the other direction.
This deep dive is to help non-experts answer questions they may face from industry advocates or simply people in their communities who don’t know all the facts.
The Basics
Legal marijuana and illegal markets
Legal marijuana does not end illegal markets. Not only that, but it also often exacerbates them, leading to a thriving underground economy that operates alongside, and sometimes within, the legal framework.
- California is the largest legal marijuana market in the union, and yet, the problem is “much worse than the government wants to acknowledge.” Illegal grows outnumber legal ones by as much as 10:1.
- Conversely, 85–90% of California-grown marijuana is exported out of state, including states where marijuana is not legal.
- In Oregon, authorities seized 1,330,766 illicit marijuana plants in 2021, a 17.3x increase from 2020 and a 253x increase from 2018.
Illegal actors do not recede when marijuana is legalized but rather innovate and exploit the regulatory loopholes and weak enforcement across the country. We’ll take a closer look at this when we get to the Chinese marijuana cartels planting themselves in a number of states.
VIDEO: A law enforcement perspective
Legal marijuana (recreational or medical) and crime
A dispensary is a dispensary, and where there are dispensaries, it’s shown that crime tends to happen. A great test case is Colorado, the first state to legalize adult recreational use:
- A Denver study found that both recreational and medical marijuana dispensaries attracted crime.
- In Denver, areas near dispensaries had 85 more property crimes per year than those without.
- Colorado’s crime rate in 2016 increased 11 times faster than the 30 largest cities in the nation since legalization
- A University of Colorado study found crime rates up to 1,452% higher in neighborhoods with at least one marijuana dispensary.
- Between 2013 to 2018 (Colorado legalized in 2012) violent crime went up 36.5% in the state.
As the first state to legalize, Colorado has served as a test case for marijuana legalization and that is especially true with regards to legalization’s impact on crime, including violent crime. Scholarly attention to this relationship has therefore focused on the Centennial State.
And this is not a Colorado-specific issue. A landmark 2024 study did look at this relationship across states that legalized adult recreational marijuana use, specifically in the years 2012 – 2014. What did they find?
From the paper:
“The results indicate that the legalization of recreational marijuana is associated with substantial and sustained increases in both property crime rates and violent crimes over time. Particularly, instances of property crime, larceny, and burglary exhibited significant and immediate spikes following the implementation of RML [Recreational Marijuana Legalization], with these heightened tendencies persisting consistently over time.”
These studies look at legalization’s impact on crime, especially violent crime, from an epidemiological level. Now let’s zoom in and think about how marijuana can lead to violent behavior at the individual level.
Marijuana use and violence
There is a relationship between marijuana use and violence enacted by the user.
- A 2024 study found that young men who use marijuana daily and have a marijuana use disorder (addiction) are 82% more likely to exhibit violent behavior compared to non-users.
- A 2020 meta-analysis found that cannabis use in youth is associated with a moderate increase in physical violence, with an odds ratio (OR) around 2.11—meaning cannabis users were over twice as likely to engage in physical violence compared to non-users.
These analyses looked at gender as a variable to better understand how marijuana affects people differently. But even more concerning is when we explicitly look at how marijuana use affects the severely mentally ill. For these individuals, both marijuana use and marijuana misuse are significantly associated with violent behavior. This is the case even when controlling for psychopathy, impulsivity, and personality disorders.
And not only is it important to look at features in individuals, but features in the marijuana itself. Namely how potent it is. The more potent marijuana is, the more likely it is to cause one to slip into psychosis, which is itself strongly linked to aggressive and violent behavior.
- A large European case-control study found that daily use of high-potency marijuana was associated with a fourfold higher risk of psychosis.
And in terms of the literal injuries wrought by violence, there is evidence that marijuana use is associated with violence there too:
- Marijuana users are 25% more likely than non-users to be hospitalized for acute trauma or bodily injury.
Being young, male, and/or severely mentally ill all bolster a relationship between marijuana use and violence in the user. On top of that, highly potent marijuana is now available which increases the possibility of violent behavior even further.
But marijuana is connected to violence at the organizational level as well.
Foreign drug cartels and marijuana legalization
Foreign drug cartels are a dominating presence in the U.S. illicit marijuana market, and marijuana legalization, as stated earlier, actually facilitates their operations. Here we take a closer look.
- Legalization is giving Mexican and Chinese cartels an avenue to operate legally in America. Why wouldn’t cartels hide in plain sight by operating farms in legal states where enforcement is minimal and customers are easily accessible?
- WSJ: “Following the legalization of marijuana in many states, Chinese-run marijuana farms have emerged across the U.S. Some are run by investor groups with a commercial growing license.”
- DEA: “Chinese and other Asian drug trafficking organizations collect millions of dollars in illicit drug proceeds from cultivating and trafficking marijuana and the money is used to fund other criminal activities, to include trafficking in other drugs, money laundering, and human trafficking.”
- Four human trafficking victims were killed in an execution-style murder at a Chinese marijuana farm in Oklahoma in 2022.
- Maine’s top marijuana regulator admitted that the state is giving licenses to foreign criminal groups. These Chinese marijuana farms are worth an estimated $4.37 billion.
- Eventually, the Chinese marijuana cartels caught the attention of lawmakers. In 2024, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers sent a letter urging the DOJ to address the growing presence of Chinese-owned marijuana farms.
VIDEO: Up Close with the CCP
Diving Deeper
Now that we’ve busted some of the most common misconceptions about marijuana legalization and crime, let’s check out some useful articles and videos that help clarify the marijuana legalization’s effects on crime.
CNN: Here’s why marijuana should not be reclassified as a lower-risk drug (Michael Brown). Brown’s career as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spanned more than 32 years and saw him involved in the interdiction of tons of marijuana in the United States and overseas. Brown sees things from a supply-side angle, and notes that officially deeming marijuana lower-risk would entail higher profits for drug cartels. He underscores how cartels will quickly pivot to absorb any new legal openings. Therefore, he concludes providing them no points of entry is pivotal
ProPublica: Fields of Green: Chinese mafias and the U.S. black market for marijuana starts with a quadruple murder on an illegal marijuana farm in Oklahoma referenced earlier, a horrid crime that then leads the reporters into an intricate web of Chinese operations in much of the U.S. illicit marijuana market. That web is rife with money laundering, human trafficking, and obviously violence. The Chinese exploited the “low-regulation, high profit” environment to engage in mass production and interstate trafficking, the latter facilitated by the “grey zone” between federal illegality and legality in certain states. The series is a great way to see how legalization can facilitate organized crime.
China’s Growing Illegal Pot Industry in the U.S. Should Spark Action (Luke Niforatos) warns that illicit marijuana operations backed by Chinese interests are proliferating across the U.S., particularly in states where marijuana is legalized. These illegal enterprises are exploiting regulatory gaps and involving elements of transnational crime. Stronger federal and state enforcement measures are in order, calling on political leaders to respond decisively to this problem.
Easing cannabis restrictions would set back the ‘Golden Age’… and boost China (Dr. Kevin Sabet) argues that President Trump’s potential rescheduling of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III is counter to inaugurating America’s “Golden Age.” Empowering Big Marijuana and criminal networks, especially Chinese illegal marijuana operations, endangers Americans on multiple levels. It would fuel the illegal market even in states like New York and California, where illicit activity already dwarfs legal sales. Overall, public health harms—including addiction and mental illness— would further worsen while offering no real societal benefit.
City Journal: Marijuana and the Mentally Ill (Stephen Eide) speaks to the discussion on how marijuana use can lead to crime committed specifically by the mentally ill population, which includes homeless people. Widespread marijuana use, especially among this group, can lead to public disorder in a best-case scenario, and violent crime in a worst-case scenario. Either way, it’s important to recognize the real relationship between the two in order to meaningfully confront it.
Long Reads
Although they are few and far between, there are some books that discuss the relationship between the increasing laxity with which society handles marijuana and the serious topic of crime, especially violent crimes.
In Smokescreen: What The Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, SAM President Kevin Sabet returns to a discussion of organized crime and how legalization fuels it. In the book, he argues that legalization has not been reduced, but in many instances exacerbated crime and public safety risks. He includes insiders’ accounts and whistleblower testimonies revealing the continued growth of illicit markets even amid legalization, indicating that criminal networks are still deeply involved because the legal market fails to meet total demand. Written in 2021, it foregrounds the Chinese catastrophe we face today. It’s worth noting that this book does not just cover this aspect of the marijuana industry, but every aspect, serving as a primer for anyone interested in learning about the marijuana industry and advocacy against it.
Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence by Alex Berenson argues that marijuana is not the benign drug legalization advocates portray, but one with profound risks for public safety. Drawing on psychiatric research and crime data, he contends that marijuana, especially heavy or high-potency use, can trigger psychosis in vulnerable individuals, and that psychosis is strongly associated with violent behavior. Berenson links rising rates of marijuana use and legalization with upticks in violent crime, citing examples from U.S. states and international cases where liberalization preceded increases in assaults and homicides. He positions legalization not as a remedy for social ills, but as a driver of both individual-level aggression (through cannabis-induced psychosis) and broader community harms.