Pubdate: Fri, 06 Jan 2017
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2017 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491

AMERICA'S $6.7 BILLION MARIJUANA HABIT, MAPPED

The marijuana industry is at a crossroads. Voters have approved
recreational marijuana measures in eight states plus the District of
Columbia. When these laws become fully implemented in the next few
years, more than one in five American adults will live in places where
they can walk into a store and legally purchase marijuana.

According to one estimate by ArcView Group, a marijuana industry
consulting firm, the legal marijuana market rang up $6.7 billion in
sales in 2016.

Legal or not, millions of Americans already use marijuana regularly.
According to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health,
8.3 percent of Americans age 12 and over -- 22 million people -- used
marijuana on a monthly basis in 2015. And close to 37 million people
used marijuana at least once that year.

The latest data release from that survey breaks those numbers down
even further, looking at marijuana consumption at the state level. It
finds that there's considerable variation in the prevalence of
marijuana use by state.

In the 2014-2015 period (years are paired for state-level data to
provide bigger sample sizes), nearly a quarter of people in places
where recreational pot is legal -- like D.C. and Colorado -- used some
form of marijuana at least once a year.

That's nearly double the national average, and it's close to three
times the rate for the most pot-abstinent states, like Alabama,
Mississippi and Iowa, where around 8 or 9 percent of people age 12 and
older use pot yearly.

Generally speaking, the Northeast and the West Coast are the two major
marijuana hotbeds in the country. Marijuana use between the coasts is
generally lower, with the notable exception of Colorado.

The state-level data shows that places with the most marijuana use
generally have some form of legal medical or recreational marijuana
available. This is likely a two-way street: places with lax attitudes
about marijuana use are more likely to approve legal marijuana, and
marijuana availability probably leads to more lax attitudes about use.

It's also instructive to compare the map of marijuana use against the
national drinking map. One notable difference is that people in the
northern plains states are heavy drinkers, but more abstemious when it
comes to pot.

There are similarities too. Alabama and Mississippi are in the bottom
tier of states on both alcohol and pot. New England, on the other
hand, ranks high on both measures.

Public health experts generally wag their fingers at folks who drink a
lot, smoke a lot, or even worse -- do both. Yet New England
consistently ranks among the most healthy regions of the United
States, taking into account a variety of measures like poverty,
immunization, education, medical care and yes, drug use.

Conversely, drug- and alcohol-averse Southern states usually show up
at the bottom of those rankings (thank God for Mississippi, as the old
social science adage goes).

None of this is to suggest that high rates and drug and alcohol use
are driving good public health outcomes in the Northeast. But the data
above are a helpful reminder that it's generally a bad idea to look at
any public health metric in isolation.
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MAP posted-by: Matt