The Crux Blog: Medical Marijuana Demagoguery Proving to be Very Wrong

When Prop 203, the initiative to legalize medical marijuana, was being considered in Arizona in 2010, opponents (particularly Shelia Polk and her comrades,) feared the worst:

They predicted "trashed neighborhoods, drug cartels disguised as medical marijuana dispensaries, increased armed robberies, burglaries, murder and organized crime." (*1)

They feared then (and still do now) that medical marijuana cards are "way too easy" to obtain and that marijuana would flood the state since unused meds would be sold on the street to children.

They called medical marijuana a "smokescreen" to full legalization and that we should expect "97-98 percent of medical marijuana cardholders (to be) aged 17 to 35 and suffer(ing) from "chronic pain". (*1)

However, the most recent (2014) Arizona Medical Marijuana Act (AMMA) End of Year Report, produced by the Arizona Department of Health Services (who issues the MMJ cards,) not only shows the opposite to have come true, but in the end, medical marijuana in Arizona is turning out to be small potatoes.

When Prop 203 passed, I wondered what percentage of the state's population (6,482,505) would sign up to get cards. Before its passage, some "Chicken Littles" did all but suggest that nearly everyone who smoked pot would sign up since it would be so easy to obtain a card. This would push the percentage to near 10%.

I thought it might be between 2-5%.

Turns out everybody got it wrong. According to the report, the number of MMJ card holding patients in 2014 was 61,272--that is less than 1%!

What's more, the still prevalent idea that 97-98% of card holders are "pain suffering" males aged 17-35 is completely untrue. In Arizona, there are just 11,181 males aged 18-30 on MMJ (one tenth of one percent of AZ's population) and 15,098 are males aged 51 and up (two tenths of one percent of AZ's pop.)

So in fact, there are 35% more male MMJ users aged 51 and over than there are male "twenty-something" users.

ALSO CONSIDER: Should Marijuana Money Go To Tax Revenues or Drug Cartels?

Still, the biggest take-away number from the report is the fact that less than 1% of Arizonans even have MMJ cards. So when our state solons get their digestive tracts in a knot over how easy it is to get a medical marijuana card, they should stop and realize just how few people we're talking about in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe, the people with MMJ cards actually do need them!