Did marijuana legalization lead to increased use in Colorado? A new study has a novel answer.

In the decade since Colorado voters passed Amendment 64 legalizing adult use of marijuana in state law, a slew of studies have tried to estimate the impact.

They’ve looked broadly and more narrowly, and have concluded — depending on how you might read them — that legalization either did or did not lead to an increase in cannabis use.

But a new study, conducted by a former Ph.D. student in Colorado, takes perhaps the most novel approach yet and comes to the conclusion that legalization may, in fact, lead to people using marijuana more frequently.

The student, Stephanie Zellers, was studying neuroscience at the University of Colorado before she followed her adviser to finish up her doctorate at the University of Minnesota. She was interested in studying the effects of substance use on the brain, but a lot of studies on the brain work the same way: you have to crack open the craniums of lab animals. That didn’t sit well with Zellers.

So she went looking for a different method, and she found it in a massive dataset on the lives of twins born in Colorado or Minnesota.

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