Not too much…and that’s greatly to its credit! The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP, pronounced “wissip”), which is the official think tank for Washington’s state legislature in Olympia, has been charged with comprehensively assessing the costs and benefits of marijuana legalization for Washington’s citizens. The initiative that legalized recreational marijuana back in 2012, I-502, explicitly requires reports from WSIPP in 2015, 2017, 2022, and 2032. It published the first of those reports (authored by Senior Research Associate Adam Darnell) yesterday.

In states where marijuana is legal, a new wedding trend is popping up: open weed bars. How do we get invited? 


Twenty-eight years after Bob Marley romanticized marijuana, the drug has earned top billing in the ultimate love-fest: weddings. 

In Washington, Colorado, Alaska, and Oregon—the four states where it’s recreationally legal —“weed weddings” have gone from a fun idea to a lucrative reality. Through sites like Cannabride.com and LoveandMarij.com ganja-loving bridges and grooms can find everything from 420-focused caterers to kush-pushing florists.

The first two states to legalize recreational marijuana have collectively raked in at least $200 million in marijuana tax revenue, according to the latest tax data — and they’re putting those dollars to good use.

In Colorado, after about a year and a half of legal recreational marijuana sales, the state has collected more than $117 million in excise taxes from both the recreational and medical marijuana markets, according to the most recent data from the Colorado Department of Revenue. 

SEATTLE — Stephen Damgaard uses medical marijuana for nerve damage in his spine, eating a small brownie made with cannabutter each morning. The weed in the butter comes from one of Seattle's many medical dispensaries -- an untaxed and illegal medical pot shop that up until now has been tolerated by authorities. 

SEATTLE — It’s an alarming trend — more people involved in deadly crashes are testing positive for marijuana.

“We have seen marijuana involvement in fatal crashes remain steady over the years, and then it just spiked in 2014,” said Dr. Staci Hoff, director of the Washington Transportation Safety Commission’s Data and Research department.

“It’s unfortunate that marijuana is playing a bigger role in deadly crashes in Washington,” said Wilma Comenat of MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

That’s why the organization, well known for their fight against drinking and driving, is now turning its attention to what they call drugging and driving.

“Your reflexes are slower … your reflexes are not 100%,” Comenat said.

As marijuana use becomes more acceptable, researchers are scrambling to answer key questions about the drug.

In 2013, Beau Kilmer took on a pretty audacious head count. Citizens in the state of Washington had just voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use, and the state's liquor control board, which would regulate the nascent industry, was anxious to understand how many people were using the drug — and importantly, how much they were consuming.

If Colorado or Washington police pull you over and find more than 5 nanograms of the mind-altering ingredient of marijuana per milliliter of blood in your system, you're guilty of stoned driving – whether you smoked three days ago or three hours ago.

And you could lose your license.

Not so in Oregon. In this state, so far at least, there's no established limit for the amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, you can have in your blood before you are presumed to be impaired while driving.

Less than a month after coming out of the cannabis closet, I found myself a part of the world’s largest annual gathering centered around cannabis: Seattle Hempfest. After several years of working as a local news reporter and anchor and hiding my cannabis use at all costs, I was suddenly speaking to hundreds of people about exactly that.

Calling my Hempfest experience surreal would be an understatement. Being my first-ever cannabis-related event, it was pretty great being thrust into the mix.

Here's a look at marijuana's role in traffic fatalities, quality-of-life issues, crime

When recreational marijuana was legalized, Washington entered the unknown, triggering questions — and predictions — about what might happen. Would drug dealers hang around the pot shops? Would it bring riffraff into the neighborhood and make shops easy crime targets? Would people abuse the drug? Or smoke and drive, putting others in harm's way?

As is evident by millions of dollars in sales each month at Vancouver's retail stores, people certainly use marijuana. And it has had some consequences on the community, but there's apparently no evidence of major behavioral shifts.

For starters, it's unclear what percentage of the population uses marijuana.