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West Virginia is the 14th most conservative state in the country. It has the third highest percentage of senior citizens in the country and it is the state where Mitt Romney won his fifth largest share of the vote. Despite all that there is still majority support for medical marijuana, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey done for the Marijuana Policy Project.
West Virginia
PPP (1/7-9)
Do you support or oppose changing the law in West Virginia to allow seriously and terminally ill patients to use medical marijuana if their doctors recommend it?
Support ………………. 53%
Oppose ………………. 40%
Not sure ……………… 6%
This poll highlights how mainstream and uncontroversial medical marijuana is with regular Americans. The public overwhelmingly supports this policy even in very conservative states like West Virginia.
Given its broad support is is absurd that the federal government continues to categorize marijuana as a Schedule I substance. This makes medical marijuana still technically illegal under federal law even in the states where it has been approved.
Photo by jamiev_0 under Creative Commons license
1 Comment
West Virginia not only has a large senior poulation they also have a large transplant population (no pun intended). West Virginia and i speak from deep, lifelong experience)is kind of like a red neck Vermont. It has a large population of displaced, transplanted white urban refugees, but they are (largely) working class “conservatives” and not (as much) college educated liberals. They are from the devastated, blasted, ruined, working class neighborhoods of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Washington, Philladelphia and the formerly industrial towns and cities of Ohio. As a group they tend to be in thier mid 40′s and up – NOT a demographic historically hostile to pot, to say the least. But they are also carrying the same baggage of working class whites elsewhere, the tragically (but by no means accidentally) misplaced rage at “libruls” and minorities at the destruction of the real economy, thier future and the future of thier children and grandchildren – a crime which has the claw marks and ligature of finance capitalism all over it, of course, but try telling them that. So, WVa., as a “Red State” is very different from Oklahoma, or the Texas panhandle, or Iowa, per se.