@realcaseyrollins a statatician might bop you about being illegal meaning people hid the drug use, and legalizing it meant it was no longer hidden, so without an accurate prior measurement you could not distinguish between a rise of use vs. revealing the total underlying use that was already there

this is actually a problem that occurs very often. 'thinking fast and slow' talked about people presuming politicians all cheat on their wives, but it's just a trick of the light because it gets selectively reported whereas other people's infedelity isn't, and they generally have the same indifdelity as everyone else

i.e. "the world is not worse than it was but we now know precisely how bad its always been"