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As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:
The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.
A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.
That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).
Good points all around.
In my neighborhood, there's another issue, which is that shitheads tend to congregate around the large pot shop (which is also a liquor store). So there is lots of crime nearby. Unclear if crime would decrease if the shop vanished, or if the shitheads would just congregate somewhere else. Either way, you don't want these places in your neighborhood.
Up here they're all in downmarket strip malls or one of those parking-lot-and-two-buildings compounds right off a state route. Nobody would tolerate them in a neighborhood, despite something like 80% of them voting to legalize it...
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