Mapping local marijuana ordinance variation in Washington State

Issues:  21 states and Washington, DC, have decriminalized medical marijuana possession.  In 2012, WA & CO decriminalized marijuana possession for personal recreational use, and are regulating legal sales. Under their police powers, local governments may regulate marijuana-related businesses.  Describing scope/focus of these regulations and monitoring change over time is critical as local policy makers, researchers, health professionals and others seek to understand the benefits and impacts of legalization.  However, few ongoing policy surveillance methods exist at the state level to report quantity/elements of local government policy.

Description:  Public Health - Seattle & King County, together with local land use and substance abuse experts, created a system to monitor change over time in volume and type of local marijuana-related ordinance provisions, collected local ordinances including cities/counties of 1000+, created and coded questions of interest to the field using inter-rater reliability methods.  Codes were entered into an online, open source, interactive tool that allows users to query the laws’ components.  Policies were collected 2x, demonstrating pre/post effects of the state law.

Lessons Learned:  WA's local laws vary widely in how local marijuana businesses are regulated.  Creating a policy surveillance system, while labor-intensive and time-consuming, is a useful tool as marijuana legalization plays out in the US.

Recommendations:  State and local health departments should consider utilizing rigorous policy surveillance methods to assure full understanding of local policy environments that affect health.  Using an open-source tool and pre-populated codebooks can create efficiencies for local audiences and help make the coding and display process manageable.