The results of the 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary have been released, and the results show that marijuana is the least of the nation’s drug worries according to answers provided by members of law enforcement across America. This of course shouldn’t shock anyone. I have friends that are in law enforcement (friends that I went to school with growing up), and all of them will be very quick to tell anyone that will listen that even before marijuana was legalized in Oregon, they least of their concerns was marijuana.
Below is more information about the survey, via the Washington Post:
America’s cops overwhelmingly do not see marijuana as a major threat to their communities, according to results of a survey released this week as part of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ”2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary.”
The DEA asked a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 law enforcement agencies what they saw as their biggest drug threats. Marijuana came in at the bottom of the list, named by only 6 percent of survey respondents. The share of law enforcement agencies naming pot has been declining steadily since the mid-2000s, even as states have moved to legalize medical and recreational marijuana during that time period.
Something that wasn’t found on the survey, but that I think definitely should have been included, was alcohol. Alcohol of course is not an illegal substance, but it is responsible for far more social costs that marijuana will ever be responsible for. I heard a cop once point out that he has been dispatched to many domestic violence incidents were alcohol was involved, but that in his entire career he had never been dispatched to a report of violence and had it involve marijuana. Below is a chart from the previously mentioned article that visually shows the results of the law enforcement survey:
