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A new survey by Quinnipiac is the latest in a string of recent polls to find that a majority of American voters think marijuana should be legal. According to Quinnipiac, 51 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal while 44 percent think it should remain illegal.
The poll found that that men overwhelmingly support marijuana legalization, 59% to 36%, but women remain narrowly opposed, 43% to 52%.
Not surprisingly the biggest divide existed on partisan and generational lines. Marijuana legalization is supported by 58 percent of Democrats and Independents but by only 31 percent of Republicans.
The survey also found that the younger a voter is, the more likely he or she is to support legalization. A solid majority of voters under the age of 45 think marijuana should be legal with voters under the age of 30 supporting legalization by a greater than two-to-one margin. On the other hand, senior citizens are the only age group where a majority want marijuana to remain illegal.
This is the fourth national poll about marijuana legalization released in the last week. Both the surveys from Angus Reid and Public Policy Polling found majority support for marijuana legalization, while the CBS News poll found Americans evenly split 47%-47% on the issue. Based on all the recent polling it is clear that a majority of the country now no longer supports marijuana prohibition and that support for legalization is likely to continue to grow.
5 Comments
Thanks for your continuing attention to this matter, Jon.
Marijuana prohibition shows me more directly than anything in my life that our federal government just does not give a damn what the people want.
Is there anything to suggest support for legalization might decline? Wouldn’t it be fair to say most Americans are familiar enough with the effects of marijuana use to make a reasoned judgment about it? It’s impossible for me to imagine anything new coming to light that would turn the polling trend around. This has to be clear to everyone in government. Continuing to pursue the current course can only be viewed as an intention to milk it for all it’s worth. Given the state of the economy, we can’t afford that.
Yeah, keep the polls coming. Every one digs the hole that much deeper for the Democratic hypocrites who claim to be scientific and evidence-based and pro-democracy and forward thinking and tolerant except when they aren’t.
Demographics alone suggest to me that in the next generation we’ll see these support numbers go through the roof, literally.
Yep, unfortunately they’re often complete, unapologetic hypocrites…like their leader.