USA - Politics Counts: Marijuana Debate Goes Mainstream

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COMMENT,
Why should YOU want cannabis legalized? “Marijuana May Slow Alzheimer’s” (WebMD- read this!), “Pot compound seen as tool against cancer” (SFGate) , “An ultra-low dose of tetrahydrocannabinol provides cardioprotection” (PubMed), “Smoked Cannabis Reduces Some Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis” (UCSD), “Marijuana Compound May Help Stop Diabetic Retinopathy” (ScienceDaily), “Marijuana may be Helpful in Lowering Blood Pressure” (BioMedicine), “Families migrate to Colorado for marijuana miracle” (DenverPost) and “Cannabis for Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease treatment” (NewsMedicalNet). Learn more by running a search for “Granny Storm Crow’s List”. Once the medical facts become known, the need for legalization becomes obvious!

Polling shows that most Americans accept that marijuana is less dangerous than SUGAR.

Why is it illegal again?

• By
• Dante Chinni

A marijuana industry job fair in downtown Denver on Thursday.

Associated Press

Dante Chinni writes Politics Counts every Friday. Mr. Chinni is the director of the American Communities Project at American University, which examines different types of communities across the U.S.
It wasn’t long ago that talking about marijuana legalization was on the fringe of American politics, and the idea was largely dismissed by the mainstream. But a range of polls suggests that is no longer the case. In fact, 2014 may be remembered as the year marijuana legalization went mainstream in politics.
Survey numbers show legalization is gaining steam across the board, while opposition isn’t strong. And this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll revealed people believe marijuana is a less harmful substance than tobacco, alcohol and even sugar.

When voters in Colorado and Washington state voted to legalize marijuana in 2012, it came as a surprise to many. This year the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that works to loosen laws around the drug, has many targets in its sights. In Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland and Washington, D.C., it aims to get the drug decriminalized — that is, to have possession or use treated like a traffic stop with with no jail time or criminal record. The group is pursuing full legalization in Rhode Island and Alaska. They have plans for other states in the year ahead.
How did this happen so suddenly? In a sense, it didn’t really. Look at questions on marijuana legalization over time and you will see a pretty clear trend going back to the 1990s, though one that has accelerated in recent years.

According to data from the Pew Research Center, 17% of Americans favored marijuana legalization in 1991. By 2002, it was 32%. In 2010, it had climbed to 41%. And it currently stands at 54%, a majority favoring legalization.

There are other numbers behind that shift.
First, there’s a growing population that has experienced the drug first-hand, as Pew notes. But another significant factor may be there simply isn’t a lot of concern about the health effects of the drug among the public, this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found. When people were asked to choose the substance was the most harmful for their health among four: tobacco, alcohol, sugar or marijuana, marijuana scored lowest. Only 8% of those surveyed rated it as the most harmful.
And that ranking of the four substances was remarkably consistent across all demographic and political groups, men and women, Democrats and Republicans and all levels of educational attainment. That kind of agreement is very hard to find on anything in America today.
Only one group on the chart below rated marijuana higher on the list, those 65-or-older – and even they ranked marijuana as less harmful than tobacco and alcohol.

Those rankings may be something of a surprise, particularly where sugar is concerned, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. It follows a larger cultural shift.
In some places, marijuana is a medicinal drug available with a prescription, while sugar is called a driving force behind the nation’s high obesity rates. In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan urged people to “say no to drugs.” Today, First Lady Michelle Obama has made fitness and healthy eating her priority.
When you consider the rankings, the push toward legalization doesn’t seem surprising, it seems logical. Why should the substance people consider the least harmful be the illegal one?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the legalization fight, the opposition isn’t strongly engaged on the issue, according to January’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
In that poll, people were asked how they would react if their state “allowed adults to purchase small quantities of marijuana for their own personal use from regulated, state-licensed businesses.” Overall people said they would favor such a law, 55% to 43%, but just as important the group that said “they would actively work to overturn” the law was fairly small across the board.
No demographic or political group in the chart below had even 30% that would “actively work” to overturn legalization and in most cases the percentage that would “actively support” the law was higher. Again, that’s a surprising amount of agreement in a divided country.

Put all those data sets together, and the trend toward legalization seems likely to continue. That trend isn’t completely uniform, of course. There are certainly still places in the U.S. where marijuana legalization seems anathema and may for some time.
Many people will be watching to see what happens in Colorado and Washington in the months and years ahead. Problems or successes with those experiments will play a big role in shaping  public opinion.
Regardless, the marijuana-legalization debate, once stuck on the fringe, is now firmly in the center of the mainstream of American politics.