If you’ve driven around the western side of Washington state within the last several years, you’ve surely taken notice of all the pot shops. Many people come to Washington only to find people smoking big loud on the streets without a care in the world.
If the culture here didn’t already seem prevalent, new evidence suggests it’s even bigger than that. A team of researchers led by Dr. Dan Burgard at the University of Puget Sound and UW that have been collecting wastewater samples from 2013-16 have found that we do in fact smoke more tough than everyone else. That’s right, Seattle is more stoned than any other metro area in the world!
These teams were using new methods to find minute amounts of THC metabolites in the waste stream—this is referring to what leaves your body no matter what form of cannabis you consume. By measuring this sewage they’ve been able to conduct one of the first studies using hard data instead of surveys to find how cannabis consumption has changed sans legalization. One of the main findings was that the black market in Washington went through rapid displacement once legal recreational sales hit, per King5 News.
An upside to using hard data is that there are no variances in the data you’d gather from surveying people normally. Dr. Burgard said that “With wastewater, it’s anonymous, and wastewater doesn’t have any reason to lie.” With legal cannabis sales increasing roughly 70% per quarter during the period of 2014-16 there was only a small amount of increase in consumption. This means that people largely buying off the black market simply made the switch to purchasing legally. They found though, that there was a notably huge spike by the end of 2016.
Washington’s Black Market Dies Quickly
Dr. Burgard brought to light that “we are part of an international study…with 60-80 other cities around the world. And according to wastewater, the Puget Sound area has the highest cannabis use per capita, even over Amsterdam.”
There has been a serious lack of studies on cannabis because of its federal legality issues so studies like this are a major turn in the right direction. Everyone from their respective state always boasts that they smoke the most, but now we have hard evidence that the rest of y’all need to catch up.
Seattle is more stoned than any other city in the world. Take a look at the Most Stoned Emcees in Seattle from our Northwest Leaf article a while back.
