Developments in cannabis enforcement practices and patterns associated with non-medical cannabis legalization policies: a basic literature/data review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-medical cannabis control has recently shifted to legalization policies in multiple jurisdictions, including North America. In addition to improved public health and safety, legalization aims to advance other, including ‘social justice’ outcomes, e.g. as related to cannabis law enforcement. We identified and examined (10) available studies from North American jurisdictions specifically assessing developments or changes in cannabis-related enforcement practices and patterns from pre- to post-legalization contexts. While source data-related study approaches and policy settings are heterogeneous, essential results suggest that legalization policy implementation has been associated with mostly 1) substantive reductions in enforced cannabis (e.g. possession/use) offenses involving legal-age adults; 2) mixed – ranging from decreases to increases – developments regarding enforcement targeting (under-age) youth; 3) decreases in total but persistence of relative race-related enforcement disparities involving both adult and youth populations. These data imply at least partial legalization-related successes toward improved related ‘social justice’ aims in these respects, while key questions remain, specifically concerning systemic enforcement biases involving racial minorities and the criminalization of underage youth as vulnerable groups. These enforcement-related outcomes of cannabis legalization policies warrant continued monitoring and in-depth policy-analytical examination, while jurisdictions newly implementing legalization should pay particular attention to ‘social justice’ objectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".