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Medical marijuana laws generate significant debate regarding drug policy. For instance, if marijuana is a complement to hard drugs, then these laws would increase the usage not only of marijuana but also of hard drugs. In this paper I study empirically the effects of medical marijuana laws by analyzing data on drug arrests and treatment admissions. I find that medical marijuana laws increase these proxies for marijuana consumption by around 10-15 percent. However, there is no evidence that cocaine and heroin usage increases. From the arrest data, the estimates indicate a 0-15 percent decrease in possession arrests for cocaine and heroin combined. From the treatment data, the estimates show a 20 percent decrease in admissions for heroin-related treatment, although there is no significant effect for cocaine-related treatment. These results suggest that marijuana may be a substitute for heroin, but it is not strongly correlated with cocaine.I believe marijuana should be illegal in our country. It is the pathway to drug usage by our society, which is a great scourge-which is one of the great causes of crime in our cities. (Mitt Romney, October 4, 2007[Altieri 2012 I believe that marijuana is a gateway drug. (John McCain, August 11, 2007

Medical marijuana laws generate significant debate regarding drug policy. For instance, if marijuana is a complement to hard drugs, then these laws would increase the usage not only of marijuana but also of hard drugs. In this paper I study empirically the effects of medical marijuana laws by analyzing data on drug arrests and treatment admissions. I find that medical marijuana laws increase these proxies for marijuana consumption by around 10-15 percent. However, there is no evidence that cocaine and heroin usage increases. From the arrest data, the estimates indicate a 0-15 percent decrease in possession arrests for cocaine and heroin combined. From the treatment data, the estimates show a 20 percent decrease in admissions for heroin-related treatment, although there is no significant effect for cocaine-related treatment. These results suggest that marijuana may be a substitute for heroin, but it is not strongly correlated with cocaine.I believe marijuana should be illegal in our country. It is the pathway to drug usage by our society, which is a great scourge-which is one of the great causes of crime in our cities. (Mitt Romney, October 4, 2007[Altieri 2012 I believe that marijuana is a gateway drug.

Most U.S. states have passed medical marijuana laws. In this paper, we study the effects of these laws on violent and property crime. We first estimate fixed effects models that control for flexible city-specific time trends. To supplement this regression analysis, we use the synthetic control method which can relax the parallel trend assumption and better account for heterogeneous policy effects. Both the regression analysis and the synthetic control method suggest no causal effects of medical marijuana laws on violent or property crimes at the national level. We also find no strong effects within individual states, except for in California where the medical marijuana law reduced both violent and property crime by 20%.

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