Does Decriminalization Work? Dramatic Decrease in California Marijuana Arrests Has Some Analysts Saying Yes

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Marijuana possession arrests in California plummeted by 86 percent following the passage of a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug, according to recently-released data from the Criminal Justice Statistics Center. Arrests fell from 54,900 in 2010 to just 7,800 in 2011. Mike Males, of the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice, said the law may “prove much more effective in reducing simple marijuana arrests than Proposition 19, or Washington’s and Oregon’s marijuana legalization initiatives passed this year.” Nationwide, he said, the current trend toward legalization might cut total marijuana arrests by half. In California, felony arrests for marijuana sales and manufacturing dropped from 16,600 in 2010 to 14,100 in 2011, a decrease of 17 percent for adults and 10 percent for young people. Additionally, from 2010 to 2011, the total number of marijuana arrests in the state plummeted by 70 percent.

Increased Teen Driver Restrictions May Not be Working

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A lot of debate exists about whether teen driving restrictions are successful, and a new nationwide study says graduated driver licensing programs placed on younger teens are merely shifting the dangers to older teens, according to the Los Angeles Times. But then others still support a study published last year in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention that found the rate of fatal crashes to be lower and the accident rate for 18- and 19-year olds to be essentially the same. For more than a decade, many states have enacted laws to restrict their newest teen drivers, such as restricting the hours when they can get behind the wheel and whom they can bring along as passengers, and public officials believed they were saving lives. Now, this new study published in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests otherwise. When the researchers examined data on more than 131,000 fatal crashes involving teen drivers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia between 1986 and 2007, they found that the number of fatal crashes among 16- and 17-year-old drivers has fallen.