LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) — You can’t legally get your hands on marijuana in Nebraska right now, but the state’s neighbors to the west and east have it legal recreationally.

In 2012, Colorado moved to legalized recreational marijuana statewide, becoming the first state in the nation to try it.

Since then, Dr. Shawn Swanson, an economist and researcher with CU Boulder, has been keeping an eye on how it has changed the state.

“I’m pretty agnostic. Right? I live here in Colorado. I just wanna figure out what’s really going on,” Swanson told 10/11 News.

Colorado voters legalized the drug through a ballot initiative, similar to Nebraska. At the time, arguments against the drug being legalized echoed some current sentiments in our state legislature.

Swanson says both proponents and opponents got some things right and other things wrong.

“One of the things opponents put out there was that, ‘Oh my god, this is gonna be getting in the hands of kids. This is awful. Every kid on earth is gonna be smoking marijuana.’ That turned out not to be true,” Swanson said.

Data and crime statistics from Colorado show that some of the alarm around recreational use may have been overblown.

DUI’s have steadily declined after 2012. Though fatal crashes have increased, Dr. Swanson says the overall number of traffic accidents hasn’t spiked.

Violent crime has risen since legalization, but Swanson says research shows the correlation between it and marijuana isn’t strong.

“A lot of research looked at violence or crime around dispensaries, and you might get some petty crime around dispensaries and stuff, but there’s really been no good research suggesting marijuana leads to violence,” Swanson declared. “There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests this.”

While the research shows most kids haven’t taken up the drug, Swanson says the data shows more adults are, leading to an uptick in cannabis use disorder.

“Now that does appear to be on the rise. Maybe to the tune of 10 percent, but the estimates are all over the place, from five percent to a study I think is completely wrong that cites it at 20 percent,” he explained.

Despite that, Colorado remains one of the stronger economies in the Midwest. And the legalization of recreational marijuana helped.

In 2024, the state raked in roughly $250 million from marijuana sales. That’s on the lower end of what it has earned in previous years. In total, the state’s raked in more than $3 billion of tax revenue since 2014.

“For Colorado, there’s basically tax on recreational sales at 15 percent, and then there’s tax of 15 percent on wholesale transactions. So that’s 30 percent right there,” the professor explained. “There’s also the standard sales tax, 2.9 percent. And some local municipalities and districts also can tax it.”

Because Nebraska’s population is only one third of that of Colorado, if legalized recreationally here, marijuana would hardly put a dent in property taxes, but it could be a boon for balancing the state budget.

Colorado also allows counties and communities levy additional taxes, adding funds to any number of projects.

Medical cannabis remains mostly tax exempt for many in Colorado, but Swanson said a significant number of people skipped getting a card once recreational marijuana hit the market.

Swanson says there’s still a lot of research needing to be done on marijuana — especially since so much of it was done with lower-THC cannabis.

He also worries about conspiracism contaminating current research.

“It also pollutes the research space, too,” Swanson argued. “You got proponents and opponents putting out garbage research that you have to sift through and find out, okay, who’s using a real identification method that actually carries weight?”

“If somebody is researching to prove a point and not just interested in what the data’s saying, right? They’re gonna prove their point. That’s problematic. Makes it really hard to do my job,” Swanson said.

Currently, there are no petition drives to legalize recreational cannabis in Nebraska, but there has been some interest in Washington to lower the scheduling of the drug.

It’s also unclear if Nebraska will even tax medical cannabis as the state doesn’t tax prescription drugs.

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