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Canada's cannabis legalization and adult crime patterns, 2015-2021: A time series study
Russell C Callaghan1, Marcos Sanches2, Andrew Hathaway3
1University of Northern British Columbia, Northern Medical Program, 3333 University Way, Prince George, British Columbia V2N 4Z9, Canada; Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Human Brain Laboratory, 250 College Street, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1R8, Canada; University of Victoria, Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR), 2300 McKenzie Avenue, Victoria, British Columbia V8N 5M8, Canada.
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.
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