New Hope for U.S. Stoner Rights
Polls Find Legalizing Pot Now More Popular than Republicans
Feb 22, 2009
Newly discovered fact: less Americans would be opposed to the idea of their family, friends and neighbours being marijuana tokers than McCain-Palin voters.
That is, if one is to take the most recent polling data from Rasmussen and Daily Kos, as fact.
Remember that old joke about 40% of all statistics being made up? Most people do, and they should, the message is a good one: never trust statistics. But that doesn’t seem to stop them from regularly citing statistics as if they were gospel. So it wouldn't be a stretch of logic to assume that this is how the public at large is reading these numbers as well.
The Facts, By The Numbers
Over Valentine's Day weekend (February 13th and 14th to be more specific), 1 000 randomly selected American adults from across the country took part in a Rasmussen telephone poll in which they were asked if they thought marijuana use should be legalized in the United States. Using similar processes of questioning and random selection, The Daily Kos Weekly State of the Nation poll telephoned 2, 400 Americans from February 2nd to 5th to ask them, among other things, what their opinions were of the Republican Party.
The Rasmussen poll found that 40% of all respondents supported the full legalization of non-medicinal marijuana, 46% oppose it and 14% weren’t sure. Only 32% of respondents to Daily Kos pollsters said they had a favourable opinion of the Republican Party; fully 60% said they had an unfavorable opinion of the GOP, with 8% having no opinion on the subject.
Americans really did seem to prefer giving their support to potheads than to Republicans, the party which happens to be the primary opponent to loosening restrictions on possessing marijuana for personal use.
Majority Support in the Near Future?
Rasmussen's conclusion fleshed out some crucial points. One was that Americans under 40 were "far more supportive" of legalizing personal possession of marijuana than the middle aged and the elderly. It also noted that Democrats were evenly divided on the issue, while 60% of Republicans opposed legalization.
In other words, as support for the Republican Party diminishes (with a subsequent decline in the party’s membership) and as the old and opposed are replaced by the new and accepting, it is only a matter of time before a majority of Americans favour a more constructive approach to marijuana policy. Such as one that treats drug abuse as a health issue and not a criminal one.
Getting There From Here, 50 000 Jailed Pot Offenders to Zero
America currently imposes the most restrictive marijuana control policies in the free world.
The drug is presently classified under Schedule 1 of the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, which places a drug used recreationally by millions of Americans every day from every walk of life in the same legal category as heroin. Marijuana’s classification in the CSA suggests that it is more important for the government to control than cocaine, opium and morphine; all of which are classified in Schedule 2 of the Act.
Marijuana has never caused a single user to die through overdose, yet it is apparently more dangerous to Americans than cocaine, which is known to kill thousands every year.
Logic in such a law is about as hard to find as an uneaten raw cookie dough in the residence of a regular cannabis user.
Per capita, the United States imprisons a larger proportion of its own population than any other country in the world. More than 1.5 million people are behind bars in the United States. Of that, the pro-legalization advocacy group Change the Climate Inc. estimates nearly 50, 000 to be locked up for possessing a small amount of Marijuana.
Slowly but surely, Americans seem to be turning their nation into a true liberal democracy that is capable, and more importantly, willing to accept the different life choices of a richly diverse citizenry.
Though voicing support for increasing personal freedoms is one thing, actually carrying out the action required to grant that freedom would be something else entirely.
As a majority is assembled, perhaps over the next decade or so, a good start would be to let a few thousand harmless stoners out of jail.
