The extent to which legalizing cannabis use might lead to increased or decreased alcohol use has important implications for public health, economic gr…
Source: Relationships between sales of legal medical cannabis and alcohol in Canada, – ScienceDirect
tl;dr: legal cannabis corelates with reducdtion in alcolhol sales. this is pre-recrational in 2018 ( i think), so will be interesting to see 5, 10 years out.
also, the numbers don’t make sense;:
“The analysis estimated that each dollar of legal medical cannabis sold was associated with an average alcohol sales decrease of roughly $0.74 to $0.84. This suggests that medical cannabis was an economic substitute for alcohol in Canada, and that the country’s 2017–2018 alcohol sales were roughly 1.8% lower than they would have been without legal medical cannabis. The results therefore indirectly imply that reduced alcohol consumption might have partly offset cannabis legalization’s health and economic impacts.”
and i maintain that since cannabis is less harmful that alcohol, less adictive, less violent behaviour, less effect on dringving, etc,m , then this is doubly good.:
“Aside from being an open theoretical question, the extent to which alcohol use increases or decreases with cannabis use also has important implications for public health, economic growth, and policymaking. If cannabis is complementary to alcohol, then cannabis legalization might benefit established alcohol producers as well as new cannabis firms; the amplified gains in employment and tax revenues could therefore increase legalization’s financial appeals to policymakers. However, such synergy would also aggravate the public health harms of both substances. By contrast, if cannabis is a substitute, its legalization might be less problematic for public health but also less attractive economically, as cannabis sales could reduce alcohol-related employment and taxes. For example, Miller and Seo [23] estimated 40% of Washington state’s cannabis taxes in 2015 were cannibalized from alcohol and tobacco taxes, an effect that Irvine and Light [19] suggested might impact Canada too.”
