Now accepting hand-written thank you notes and congratulatory Chili's gift certificates.

You hear it everywhere: Colorado's ultra-dank legal weed is flooding the rest of the country, inundating other states with a mass of top-notch product that creates headaches for law enforcement.

Nebraska and Oklahoma even famously sued Colorado over the state's legal marijuana market, complaining that our bountiful bud is putting an unfair strain on their police budgets. And a recent USA Today story described a “flow of high-quality marijuana out of Colorado” and into other states.

Turns out, all that's kinda bullshit. The hand-wringing worries of neighboring states that our cheap, potent weed is drowning their otherwise saintly populaces are not only unwarranted and perhaps a bit overblown, but also incorrect.

According to new data from The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), which compiles data on federal law enforcement efforts, federal marijuana trafficking offenses have actually declined in the years following legalization in Colorado. The decline even continues thought 2015, the last year data was available.

“The number of marijuana traffickers rose slightly over time until a sharp decline in fiscal year 2013 and the number continues to decrease,” the report says.

Meanwhile, meth and heroin trafficking appear to be on the rise.

USSC isn't quite sure why legal weed is leading to federal trafficking declines, but they have some theories.

For one, legalized pot could be reducing demand for black market sales. State prosecutors could also have changed how they charge defendants. Or there could be some other nebulous reason. No one really knows. USSC says their data doesn’t provide enough information to draw a conclusion.

Meanwhile, weed tourism is healthy as ever in Colorado. Millions of people flock to the THC-laced haze of our square state each year to sample our pot. Maybe the trafficking decline is because people are coming to where the weed is, not the other way around? Just sayin'.

None of this, of course, means that some weed from places like Colorado and Washington isn't illegally making its way across the border into neighboring states. There's no doubt our cup overflowth … it's just not doing so as much as it was before legal weed. 

If legal weed were truly creating a problem of excess marijuana from other states, you'd expect to find an entirely different data set; one that confirmed interstate trafficking has increased, not decreased. Since that's not the case, it seems safe to assume that concerns about widespread marijuana smuggling are just that; concerns, not realities.

In other news, you're welcome, other states! No one know why our legal weed is actually curtailing illegal activity, but it is, so you can thank us by continuing to spend billions of dollars on it so we can re-pave the shithole road by our house.