Do we have any randomized trials of the effects of weed legalization?
I don’t think such a trial is possible; laws have to be uniform over large geographic areas to function, so noise from demographic effects drown out the data, and no government would allow its laws to be determined randomly for study purposes, anyways.
I have often thought new laws at the federal level should be treated much like new drugs are treated by the FDA. They should go through rigorous testing according to clear criteria. The proposer of a new law should specify in advance what effect they hope this law would have on the world and how we might measure this effect. Then when the law gets passed, a few small states (or perhaps counties) are initially chosen as the test group—the law only takes effect in those areas. To control for the placebo effect, we should also have a few regions in which the law is announced to take effect but is not, in practice, enforced. Then after ten years we look at the data and see whether the states with the new law are better off than they were before and better off than the states without it—better off specifically according to the previously-specified metric to a statistically significant degree.
Only after it passes that test, is the law extended to the entire nation.
Not all things can be measured practically, and testing of politically-loaded topics (including most laws that have serious opposition) would be inherently biased. Also, as mentioned upthread, many laws would have no effect or drastically different effect when true at only the local level from the effect if national; for example, dry counties (counties with local prohibition) do not resemble the national-scale effects of Prohibition.
I don’t think such a trial is possible; laws have to be uniform over large geographic areas to function, so noise from demographic effects drown out the data, and no government would allow its laws to be determined randomly for study purposes, anyways.
I have often thought new laws at the federal level should be treated much like new drugs are treated by the FDA. They should go through rigorous testing according to clear criteria. The proposer of a new law should specify in advance what effect they hope this law would have on the world and how we might measure this effect. Then when the law gets passed, a few small states (or perhaps counties) are initially chosen as the test group—the law only takes effect in those areas. To control for the placebo effect, we should also have a few regions in which the law is announced to take effect but is not, in practice, enforced. Then after ten years we look at the data and see whether the states with the new law are better off than they were before and better off than the states without it—better off specifically according to the previously-specified metric to a statistically significant degree.
Only after it passes that test, is the law extended to the entire nation.
Remember: “if it saves one life, it’s worth it.”
Not all things can be measured practically, and testing of politically-loaded topics (including most laws that have serious opposition) would be inherently biased. Also, as mentioned upthread, many laws would have no effect or drastically different effect when true at only the local level from the effect if national; for example, dry counties (counties with local prohibition) do not resemble the national-scale effects of Prohibition.