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Recreational Marijuana Laws and Racial Disparities: New Evidence on Arrests and Deaths of Despair

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Abstract

Proponents of recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) argue that expanding legal
access to marijuana may serve an important social justice objective by reducing
racial disparities in arrest rates. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports
and a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we find support for this
claim: RML adoption is associated with a reduction of 498–561 marijuana arrests per 100,000 persons (over 90 percent) among Black adults and a reduction
of 128–145 arrests (78–88 percent) among White adults. However, we find no
evidence that RML adoption reduces racial disparities in nonmarijuana drug arrests or arrests for property and violent crimes, and post-RML reallocation of
policing resources to fight nonmarijuana drug crime and violent crime may, in
some circumstances, widen these racial disparities. Finally, RMLs reduce opioid-
related mortality among non-Hispanic Whites relative to Blacks and Hispanics,
consistent with the hypothesis that those hardest hit at the outset of the US opioid epidemic disproportionately gain from recreational marijuana legalization.

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