A full two-thirds of Americans support full legalization of marijuana!

Arjun Singh reports,

Colorado’s and Washington’s voters approved referenda to legalize cannabis in 2012 — the first states to do so — after which Alaska and Oregon followed. The effort spread from the West across the country, with ten states’ legalization referenda being approved in six years. Currently, 18 states have legalized cannabis for recreational use, with eight doing so since 2020. In doing so, they’ve paved the way for a new recreational-cannabis industry, which has experienced explosive growth. According to a 2017 GQ article, by that year the industry was worth $40 billion, and marijuana had become the second-largest cash crop in the U.S. (after corn).

Support for legalization has crossed party lines. No longer are open cannabis advocates just hippies or young leftists. Per a recent Gallup poll, a full two-thirds of Americans support full legalization of the substance. Republicans, in conjunction, have undergone an evolution on the use of cannabis, from moral condemnation to a libertarian position of passive acceptance, with half supporting legalization and fewer than half opposed. Reforms to cannabis laws have now sprung up in Republican-led states, with Montana passing and South Dakota debating measures to permit recreational use, while most states have enabled cannabis to be prescribed by a doctor. Only in a minority of states is neither recreational nor medical marijuana legal.

The significance of this support, especially among conservatives, should not be understated. Though the heyday of Reefer Madness — a 1936 film linking cannabis use to hallucination, rape, suicide, murder, which influenced popular perceptions about the drug — has long passed, cannabis remained a taboo substance in the 1970s and through the Reagan Revolution. The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CSA) of 1970, signed by Richard Nixon, classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug — i.e., prohibiting both recreational and medical use — a status higher than cocaine and fentanyl. Reagan himself called marijuana “probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today,” and conservatives supported harsh criminal penalties for its use well into the 1990s.

Read more here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/4-20-weeds-journey-through-conservative-politics/