Citation

Callaghan RC, Sanches M, Hathaway A, Asbridge M, Kish SJ. Addict. Behav. 2023; 146: e107813.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107813

PMID

37515896

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIM: A central goal of the Cannabis Act (October 17, 2018) - Canada's national cannabis legalization framework - aimed to reduce cannabis-related criminalization and consequent impact on the Canadian criminal justice system. We assessed whether Canada's cannabis legalization was associated with changes in adult police-reported cannabis-related, property, or violent criminal incidents.

DESIGN: Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) time series models evaluated relations between legalization and adult cannabis-related, property, and violent crimes, using criminal incident data from the Canadian Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR-2; January 1, 2015-December 31, 2021). PRIMARY SAMPLE: National police-reported adult cannabis-related offenses (n = 247,249), property crimes (n = 2,299,777), and violent crimes (n = 1,903,762).

FINDINGS: Implementation of the Cannabis Act was associated with decreases in adult police-reported cannabis-related offenses: females, -13.2 daily incidents (95% CI, -16.4; -10.1; p < 0.001) - a reduction of 73.9% [standard error (se), 30.6%]; males, -69.4 daily offenses (95% CI, -81.5; -57.2; p < 0.001) - a drop of 83.2% (se, 21.2%). Legalization was not associated with significant changes in the adult property-crime or violent-crime series.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that Canada's cannabis legalization was successful in reducing cannabis-related criminalization among adults. There was also a lack of evidence for spillover effects of cannabis legalization on adult property or violent crimes.

Language: en

Keywords

Adults; Canada; Crime; Cannabis legalization; Criminal justice system