Funny how the percentage of politicians supporting it is still tiny.
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Wouldn’t decriminalizing pot help with the “opioid epidemic”?
If Trump helped bring about legalization I think my head would explode.
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I’d bet the majority of people opposing legalization are over 70, and they don’t want to risk losing those reliable voters.
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You mean the people who were teens & young adults during the 1960s? Yeah, that generation was infamous for hating marijuana.
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I mean the ones that didn’t. There were a lot of young people in the 60s who weren’t part of the counterculture. It wasn’t like a switch was flipped and everyone turned on. My wife’s parents were born in the early 40’s, but in the northern Midwest where it was pretty conservative. They didn’t smoke weed, but he smoked a tobacco pipe in his 20’s!!
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Just the ones who listened to Timothy Leary.
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To put it more simply, even Republicans smoke weed, and the youth of my generation (Baby Boomers) are now a solid voting bloc who support legalization because many of them have been doing it, or have been around it, for 50 years.
The economics are overwhelmingly of great benefit to the state governments that allow it.
As noted earlier, the only reason for criminalization is to continue to victimize people of color, and to support the private prison industrial complex.
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I dunno. I’d bet my 1%er Republican brother who smoked plenty is opposed. Once you got that hypocrisy factory going it’s hard to stop. It’ll just keep churning it out cost free.
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No doubt there are some of them out there, and the hypocrisy is a feature, for sure. But even my home state Florida, filled with old back-hair covered retirees, voted solidly to legalize.
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But most of them are Liberals from the Northeast. I wonder how that goes in Arizona where the conservative Midwesterners retire?
Au contraire, many of them are working class pensioners from the Northeast and the Midwest who vote solidly GOP. To go along with the Cubans from South Florida who are generally GOP voters as well. North Florida is also solidly conservative and is often referred to as L.A., or Lower Alabama.
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@Wanderfound those are the kind of stats that add to the class/race confusion in the US. Is it possible that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be on death row not so much due to racism but because blacks are more than twice as likely to be poor and poor people commit far more crimes? The conflation of race and class by both side of the race discussion is one of the things making dialogs about it difficult.
Http://prospect.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/graph_8.jpg?itok=XR3N4FMf
That’s not been my experience in S FL. The NE retirees are the only reason FL is a swing state.
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Last year in S.D. dispensaries were selling 4g “8ths”, and earlier this year 5g eighths! Over the summer I was up in Oregon and I was like, pffft, only 3.5 grams in the eighths?
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Mark my words: Trump will deschedule marijuana when he is desperate for a boost in the polls, when something so terrible is coming and he needs to distract us.
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It’s not just an opioid epidemic. Lots of people abusing benzos and alcohol who might be better served lighting up after work.
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Almost like part of the race problem is the regulation of most nonwhite people to underclass positions.
Race and class are pretty thoroughly mixed in the U.S. You think rich people here were willing to pass up the convenience of social class having literal color-coding attached to it?
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YMMV. Not to be tiresome about my kids magnet school, but its 90% non-white kids, who are all college bound. We simply don’t see that conflation of race and class the same. I am optimistic this is the future, where skin color does not determine your income.
Back in 2012, when the age of totally fake phone calls hadn’t quite dawned, I answered a number I didn’t recognize. It was Gallup. I took their poll because, well, why not?
Haven’t they backtracked in Portugal?
I am talking about heavy stuff, not weed.
