Fact check: Ohio GOP claims legalizing marijuana increases crime. It doesn't, legal expert says.

Yahoo

10-03-2025

Now-Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, left, and Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, right. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)
Ohio Republican lawmakers continue to draft legislation restricting access to recreational marijuana, angering citizens across the political spectrum.
But when one of the most powerful leaders is urging for restrictions, claiming that marijuana increases crime, viewers and readers asked us to look into it.
We have a running series of answering questions and concerns about weed. This story focuses mainly on the lawmakers, claims they are making, and why they are proposing changes to current policy.
Earlier installments have focused on learning the basics of the law, and then how to buy it, before it was open legal sales started in August 2024. Then, we answered questions on where to partake and then employment concerns. Our most recent story dealt with the latest restrictive proposal passed by the Ohio Senate.
Many of the questions and comments for this piece stemmed from Thursday's story, which was about the Ohio House's proposal.
First, let's break down the current law. If you are 21 years old or older, you can smoke, vape, and ingest marijuana. Individually, you can grow six plants, but you can grow up to 12 plants per household if you live with others.
You can have up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana in all forms except for concentrates, which you can only have up to 15 grams.
There are two bills being proposed by legislators — Senate Bill 56 and House Bill 160. Both make dozens of changes to cannabis access, but most notably, S.B. 56 limits THC content and reduces home growing to six plants while H.B. 160 limits THC and keeps home growing the same.
For deep dives into each proposal, click here for Senate version and here for House version.
Although House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, was addressing a question about local governments having their fair share of the tax revenue from marijuana, he made some statements about crime that caught our interest.
'Those local governments, by and large, are going to use the revenue to deal with the problems that are caused by more marijuana being available in the community — we're going to have more crime; we're going to have more addiction problems,' Huffman said.
'What are you basing that off of?' we asked the speaker.
'Really?' he responded incredulously.
When this reporter nodded, he laughed and said he would give me what he thought was an equivalent. This was alcohol.
'The more alcohol is available, the more people drink and the more bad behavior results… That's what happens with marijuana and other substances that cause people to think poorly when they take it,' he said.
He also said that it is linked to an increase in suicides if teens get access to it.
'I think that it's pretty clear that the science shows real problems, and we'll have to deal with it,' he added.
But Case Western Reserve University Law professor Jonathan H. Adler, who also wrote 'Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane,' a book on the intersection of marijuana legalization, law and crime, corrected Huffman.
'When you look at crime statistics in jurisdictions that have taken this step, you don't see dramatic effects on crime and certainly don't see evidence of significant negative effects on crime, or increases in crime, that some people fear,' Adler said. 'There's evidence that suggests some sorts of crime may, in fact, decline.'
Legalization of adult-use cannabis 'appears to reduce highway fatalities, appears to reduce some types of violent crime,' he continued.
Even OVI incidents and enforcements in Ohio are down from 2024, before legal sales went into effect. As of March 2, there have been hundreds fewer in 2025 than this time last year, according to data from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Dozens of studies done over decades have had differing results, which is why Adler warns about using absolutes as Huffman did.
'People on various sides of the debate about marijuana legalization cherry-pick the studies that support their priors,' the professor continued. 'But when you look at the broader reviews of the literature as a whole, they don't see these big effects.'
One must be careful not to confuse correlation and causation, he continued. There are so many variables as to why crime may increase one year and not the next.
Although he dismissed Huffman's claims about crime and addiction, he acknowledged the speaker's statement that marijuana has been linked to youth suicide.
'The evidence that you see overall increases in suicide is still very weak,' he said.
There is a stigma surrounding marijuana, and for a reason, he added. Federally, it's still illegal — so it's a crime. If someone is already breaking the law to steal, they probably wouldn't have an issue with breaking the law to smoke weed. But those crimes still aren't comparable.
'A lot of the negative effects that were predicted don't appear to be materializing,' he said. 'That doesn't mean there aren't negative effects, right?'
This isn't to say that cannabis is a wonder drug, he laughed.
'Positive predictions not panning out — a lot of states thought the economic benefits in terms of tax revenue would be far greater than they've turned out to be,' he said.
He said he thinks marijuana should be regulated like alcohol at the federal level, for sure, but that Huffman can't treat them the same when it comes to what they do to the body.
'There are people who will have a lot of alcohol and want to go out and do crazy things,' he said. 'And a lot of people that will want to use marijuana just sit on their couch and watch Netflix and eat Doritos or something.'
The 'empirical evidence does seem to confirm a bit of that stereotype,' he laughed.
Although he was speaking as a nonpartisan professor, Adler, who is a well-known conservative commentator, gave a final warning to the GOP leaders.
'There is always a risk that increasing regulation or restricting what's available to consumers will push some people into the illicit market,' he said.
Senate GOP leaders have continued to say that the voters knew they wanted legal weed — but didn't know everything they were voting on.
When it came to the other chamber and their more flexible version, we asked House Finance Chair Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, who is sponsoring H.B. 160, the same question.
'What do you say to the voters who say this isn't what they chose and they spoke, they don't want it reduced to 70%, they don't want the taxes going to the general revenue fund,' we asked him.
'I think that there is a core of what voters made clear that they wanted, that showed up in virtually all debate and public testimony on this, which is: 'We want to legalize marijuana, we want it to be taxed at 10%, we want to be able to grow it at home,'' the lawmaker responded. 'I think that beyond that, I think there's some fine print that was less important to folks in making that determination [of] how they voted.'
He continued, adding that the voters put this forward as an initiated statute.
'Any idea that we're going to pass a law, and it's just the law for the end of time, and it's never subject to the democratic process and revision is not realistic, right?' he said. 'Putting something into initiated statute leaves it within the realm of the democratic process. So I think we are making very, very few changes here, and I think the folks who have contacted my office and said, 'Hey, we don't want certain restrictions on Issue 2' — nothing in our bill here contradicts that.'
'Are you insinuating that voters didn't read the entirety of Issue 2 and didn't know what they were voting on?' we asked.
'I have no idea what every single voter did or didn't do,' he replied. 'I said, I think when this is marketed as 'regulate marijuana like alcohol,' — we're doing that here. You have a 10% tax rate. It's legal. You can do it at home. We're not touching any of the core parts of Issue 2.'
To find your district's legislators, click here. You will see a page where you can put in your address. From there, two people should pop up on the screen. If you click the icon of the lawmaker, you will be transported to their page. From there, you will see a banner with different options. Click the one that says 'Contact.' Depending on your browser, you may need to click a 'More' option before 'Contact.'
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