Study: Let Marijuana And Gambling Mix In Nevada

Here’s a fun fact about me: When I’m high, my desire to gamble — let’s call it my gambling libido, just to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible — goes down.

Build DFS lineups after a gummy? While I can, I’m not nearly as sharp as I think I am when I’m sober. Play Lucky Larry’s Lobstermania Slingo after smoking half a joint? I’d rather eat a lobster, thank you very much. Sit down for a blackjack session after a bong rip? I have a hard enough time remembering what to do with A-7 against a face card sober, never mind while I’m contemplating universal truths.

As it turns out, I’m in the perceived and actual minority on this, as numerous papers indicate weed and gambling are nestled together quite nicely for people who partake in both. (Another fun fact: If you want to know if someone smokes weed or not, listen to their speech. If they ever, in any fashion, use the word “partake,” they get high. That is #Science.)

More on those papers later, but first, a new paper from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Cannabis Policy Institute: As a result of the church-and-state situation when it comes to marijuana and gambling in Sin City and the rest of Nevada, tens of millions of dollars are being lost and the illegal marijuana industry is thriving.

The rules in Nevada go a long way toward keeping cannabis and gambling separate. For starters, marijuana delivery is only allowed to private residences, so you can’t order a half-ounce to your room at the Bellagio. Second, licensed dispensaries cannot be within 1,500 feet of a gambling establishment, meaning some 75% of visitors to Vegas can’t walk to get weed, per the study. Third, if you own a gaming license, you can’t own a cannabis license. And vice versa. 

All told, per the study, this is costing the cannabis business some $750 million a year, and costing the state about $80 million in tax revenue.

And how, exactly, is all this money being left on the table? Consider Mandalay Bay: If you’re staying there and want to legally buy weed, you’re looking at a 95-minute round-trip walk, including a jaunt across a highway overpass. Don’t have an hour-and-a-half to kill? Spend $35 for a taxi ride that will essentially double the cost of the eighth you’re after. From Caesars Palace, it’s 65 minutes on foot. The Venetian has 160 stores on its property, and exactly zero of them can sell cannabis.

So what do most tourists do? They buy from the guy in the club, or the guy on the street, or the guy who slid into their DMs after they posted a pool selfie. The UNLV study estimates about 30 million Vegas visitors a year get shut out of the legal market entirely, which the authors call “the biggest boost to illegal drug markets and drug dealers of any policy currently in place in Nevada.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but last time I was on the Strip, I was asked if I needed anything by at least a half-dozen very accommodating men. I demurred. I was too busy having a pleasant conversation involving sex toys and ketamine. 

Two great tastes

But as I said earlier … I’m the outlier. A bunch of other studies bear this out.

Per a study out of Oregon, cannabis users are 180% more likely to have gambled in the past year than non-users, and 130% more likely to gamble multiple times a week. A separate Canadian national survey found that 56% of adults who gamble and also use cannabis report doing both simultaneously.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is the why. A 2024 University of Memphis study asked frequent gamblers who use cannabis what they expect weed to do to their gambling. The top answers: It makes them feel calmer, makes gambling more enjoyable, and it increases their gambling skills. On the first two, maybe. On the last one? I mean, come on.

And one more wrinkle, from a follow-up by the same Memphis research group: The relationship between how much weed someone smokes and how problematic their gambling gets isn’t a straight line. It’s an inverted U. The lightest and heaviest cannabis users reported fewer gambling problems than the people in the middle. The researchers’ theory is that chronic users develop a kind of tolerance and adjust their behavior, while light users just don’t gamble much when they’re high to begin with. It’s the moderate users getting hit hardest.

At any rate, the basic premise of the UNLV study is simple: Stop the silliness and let gambling and cannabis freely interact. It’s happening anyway, and taking two legal acts but making them illegal together makes no sense, economic or otherwise.

You don’t need to contemplate the state of the universe to come to this realization.