SAM COMMENT > Look for the liquor, beer and wine industries to be lobbying against the passage of laws making marijuana possession and use legal. They of course are well aware of alcohol sales, yet they represented to lawmakers and to the public that alcohol plus other drug usage would increase if marijuana became legal. Marijuana was perceived as the gateway drug. Then it was opioid use. Next month it will be something else. Coffee? Looks like they got caught in a lie, or more accurately a lot of guesswork based on guesswork, for the purpose of keeping marijuana use illegal to keep their sales up.
Medical marijuana laws caused alcohol sales to tumble in many states, according to a new paper co-authored by Georgia State University Economics Professor Alberto Chong.
The impact on sales was long-term, with reductions in alcohol consumptionobserved up to two years after the passage of the laws. The findings boost scientific evidence that legal access to marijuana reduces drinking.
The researchers analyzed beer, wine and alcohol sales for more than 2,000 U.S. counties over a 10-year period (2006 to 2015). Chong and his collaborators used the Nielsen Retail Scanner database, which they note provides a more accurate measure of alcohol consumption than self-reported surveys, in which respondents are known to under-represent how much they drink.
They compared alcohol purchases between states that passed medical marijuana laws and states that didn’t, before and after the laws were implemented.
Alcohol purchases decreased by 15 percent in counties in states with medical marijuana laws, results showed. This was true even when correcting for demographic and economic factors known to influence alcohol consumption, such as sex, age, unemployment rate and median household income…
READ ON > Medical marijuana laws reduced alcohol consumption
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