cannabisnews.com: America’s $6.7 Billion Marijuana Habit
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America’s $6.7 Billion Marijuana Habit
Posted by CN Staff on January 06, 2017 at 06:36:21 PT
By Christopher Ingraham
Source: Washington Post
USA -- 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.On a surface level, of course. But there were also secrets, lies, and treachery beneath those glittering appearances.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. Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.Source: Washington Post (DC)Author: Christopher IngrahamPublished: January 8, 2017Copyright: 2017 Washington Post CompanyContact: letters washpost.com Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ URL: http://drugsense.org/url/k4GBjnaECannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml 
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Comment #2 posted by The GCW on January 07, 2017 at 05:40:29 PT
Re: Alabama, bottom tier and Sessions,,,
Alabama?Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III?There is a lot to be hopeful for. One thing to hope for is that there's enough disapproval of Sessions for U.S. Attorney General to stop Him.!... "Sessions was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as a federal judge but rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, some of them Republicans, on the grounds that he was too racist to serve."... "Former Justice Department civil rights lawyer, J. Gerald Hebert testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions had called the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.” More recently, Hebert told CNN, "Things that I had heard firsthand from him were things that demonstrated gross racial insensitivity to black citizens of Alabama and the United States.”Thomas Figures, a former assistant U.S. attorney who is African American, testified that Sessions called him “boy” and joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “O.K. until I found out they smoked pot.”" ...Cont.http://www.alternet.org/activism/alabama-naacp-not-backing-down-after-jeff-sessions-office-lashes-out-0-I know there are good people in Alabama, however, the percentage of people in Alabama that are not good there may be higher. Got to be high on something; might as well be something good not something bad."More than 1,100 law school professors from across the United States registered their opposition to Sessions in an open letter sent Tuesday. "Nothing in Senator Sessions's public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge,” they wrote. A petition opposing Sessions has garnered over 200,000 signatures."I'd have to submit the entire article to help exposed how unexceptable Beauregard is!
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Comment #1 posted by The GCW on January 06, 2017 at 18:59:15 PT
THC deficient & the bottom tier.
"Americans age 12 and over"What happens when they consider, Americans age 18 and over or 21 and over? What happens when they say, 12 and over? -What's their objective in that?-0-"pot-abstinent states" As in THC deficient? No. Perhaps there is less people there who use cannabis in part because smart people in those locations have vacated the premises. -For better places to live...-0- "Alabama and Mississippi are in the bottom tier of states on both alcohol and pot."That's "bottom tier"You can race for the top or You can race for the bottom. Can live where You will be persecuted or live where You will not be persecuted. Stories of localities with young people leaving where they grew up and localities wishing they'd stay...-Stay in the bottom tier.-0-Hold Your hand up and repeat after Me.I want to live in the bottom tier.
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