Crime rates in Denver, Colorado, have fallen since January, when recreational marijuana sale was authorized in the state.
In data released by the Colorado Department of Public Safety, the statistics show crimes related to property in the first two months of recreational sales saw a decline of 14.6 percent in the capital compared to the same time frame last year. Violent crime rates fell by 2.4 percent.
Homicide rates fell by 66.7 percent. Robberies declined by 7.2 percent.
Officials say that two months are too less to arrive at any conclusions. But the data is encouraging as it was previously feared that pot legalization would shoot up crime rates in Colorado.
"We quite frankly don't know," Henny Lasley, spokesperson for Smart Colorado, an organisation that protects youth from marijuana, told Vox. "We've had three complete months of retail marijuana. We were getting those questions three days into legalization. It's a pretty short window."
According to Tom Gorman, director of Rocky Mountains High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, the accurate changes due to marijuana legalization may be seen only after three or four years.
"This is a great opportunity for us to find out what happens when you legalize a substance like marijuana," he told Vox. "Just wait and watch what happens in these labs, and then you can make a decision based on data and facts and not rhetoric."
Denver has a vast majority of Colorado's operational recreational marijuana dispensaries that have generated enormous sales revenue since Jan. 1, 2014. In the first month itself the sales skyrocketed to $14 million, reported Huffington Post last month.
A recent study published in PLOS One stated that medical marijuana did not contribute to increasing levels of crime and rather reduced the instances of offences.
