Studies: Legal pot can make communities healthier and safer


A collection of recent research on states that have legalized medical and/or recreational marijuana use finds that legal pot can actually make communities safer and healthier by a variety of metrics. These benefits include:
♦ Lower suicide rates, including a drop of 10.9 percent for men aged 20-29, a high-risk group.
♦ An 8 to 11 percent drop in traffic fatalities, the leading cause of death for Americans age 5 to 34 (Colorado in particular has seen highway fatalities plunge).
♦ Lower rates of violent crime and property crime — 5.6 percent and 11.4 percent, respectively, in Denver.
Oh, and when weed is legal, it seems to be less appealing to teenagers: Teen marijuana use is on the decline as it becomes legal in more and more states.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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