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

Proponents of recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) argue that expanding legalaccess to marijuana may serve an important social justice objective by reducingracial disparities in arrest rates. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reportsand a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we find support for thisclaim: RML adoption is associated with a reduction of 498–561 marijuana arrests per 100,000 persons (over 90 percent) among Black adults and a reductionof 128–145 arrests (78–88 percent) among White adults. However, we find noevidence that RML adoption reduces racial disparities in nonmarijuana drug arrests or arrests for property and violent crimes, and post-RML reallocation ofpolicing resources to fight nonmarijuana drug crime and violent crime may, insome 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.