
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper supports the recreational marijuana industry in his home state, but he's also not opposed to repealing cannabis legalization if necessary to preserve public safety.
"I'm not ruling it out," Hickenlooper told CNN earlier this week when discussing crime in the Centennial State.
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In 2014, Colorado became the first state to allow the sale, possession and consumption of recreational marijuana. Since then, a lot of fears surrounding cannabis legalization have been dispelled: the number of adolescent consumers didn't spike, and the roads weren't flooded with high drivers. But the crime rate has risen well above the national trend since 2014, and if cannabis is to blame for that, Hickenlooper is willing to pull the plug on the marijuana industry.
"Trust me, if the data was coming back and we saw spikes in violent crime, we saw spikes in overall crime, there would be a lot of people looking for that bottle and figuring out how we get the genie back in," he said.
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