This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 7, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Colorado now has a few years of experience with legal marijuana.

So how has that experiment gone?

John Caldera of the Independence Institute argues that there are still a few problems to be

worked out, such as determining levels of intoxication for drivers, but so far the real story of legalization is that not much has changed.

When Colorado and Washington in the same year moved ahead with legalization of marijuana,

it seemed to be that Colorado's system,

it rolled out more quickly.

The retail of marijuana in Colorado occurred more quickly and in general the people who

are reformers in favor of legalizing marijuana throughout the United States

argued that that was a better system.

But there are organized efforts of mixed success

that have argued that this has been a bad thing in general. What have the data told us about the

experience across a variety of metrics in Colorado on marijuana.

There is data and then there is anecdotal examples.

So let's go over the data first.

The data has been remarkably positive in that tax revenues

from marijuana sales have been much higher than expected. So much higher that they broke the tax limits and a vote

needed to happen statewide to keep the excess revenue created from from marijuana.

One of the measures we were looking at most closely is what does this do to

drug use with children, marijuana use with children.

...