Pot prohibition is going up in smoke.
Researchers asked 1,680 people whether they thought
marijuana should be made legal.
According to the General Social Survey (GSS), which is
considered the nation’s most reliable, 51.7 percent said they supported
legalization and 41.7 percent said they opposed it, while 6.6 percent were
undecided.
“We’ve been measuring public attitudes toward legalization
of marijuana since the ’70s,” Tom W. Smith, director of the GSS, said in an
interview with Yahoo News. “In 2012, you had a plurality of Americans against
legalization. Now, in 2014, you have a majority in favor of legalization.”
The Washington Post, which first reported on this new data,
points out that the drastic change resembles America’s evolving opinion on gay
marriage — and there has been a drastic change in the past few years.
Smith notes that the percentage of undecided respondents on
the question of marijuana has been relatively high over the past decade.
“It shows how attitudes are in flux. They’re just not sure,”
Smith said. “They might think medical marijuana is OK but not further than
that.”
He suggested that some Americans may need to weigh the
longstanding reputation of cannabis as a gateway drug with the reality of
recreational use in Colorado, Washington State, Alaska, the District of
Columbia and (this July) Oregon.
Back in 1973, the first year of the survey, only 19.2
percent of Americans supported legalization. That figure bottomed out at 15.6
percent in 1987 but has climbed more or less steadily ever since.
Morgan Fox, communications manager for the Marijuana Policy
Project, says that Americans are tired of laws that punish adults for enjoying
a substance that many argue is safer than alcohol.
"Hopefully their elected officials are paying attention
and preparing for the inevitable," Fox said in a statement. "The
failures of marijuana prohibition are too obvious to ignore forever, which is
evidenced by the growing support for ending it."
GSS is an in-person survey of adults, who speak either
English or Spanish, living in households in the United States.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/majority-of-americans-support-marijuana-legalization-for-first-time--survey-shows-211700847.html
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