Majority Of Republicans Now Favor Legalizing Pot: Poll

As more states legalize marijuana, a majority of Americans describing their political leanings as Republican now favor legalizing marijuana for recreational use by adults, according to a new Gallup poll released Wednesday. The poll showed 51 percent of Republicans support legalizing pot, up sharply from 42 percent last year. A majority of voters who identify as Democrats or independents have supported legalization since 2010, Gallup said.

Overall, 64 percent of respondents to the survey said pot should be legal — the highest measure of support since Gallup began polling Americans on the subject in 1969, when marijuana was associated with hippies and radicals protesting the Vietnam War and racial injustice. Only 12 percent of Americans favored legalizing pot in the initial poll, and though support had about doubled by the end of the next decade, it changed little in the 1980s and 1990s, Gallup said. By 2001, about a third of Americans said casual use of marijuana by adults should be legal, and by 2013, a majority of Americans of all political stripes favored legalization.

Gallup said the shifting views on marijuana mirror the trajectory of support for gay marriage, which reached 60 percent ahead of the watershed U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Today, 64 percent of Americans support both same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, up from about 25 percent support on both issues in the 1990s.

The Gallup poll results were based on telephone interviews conducted Oct. 5-11 with 1,028 adults aged 18 and older, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Gallup said the poll had an error margin of 4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

Also See: Study: Medical Marijuana Helps Some Kids With Epilepsy

Recreational marijuana is illegal at the federal level, and the Trump administration Justice Department hasn’t shown any signs that it wants to see the federal statutes relaxed and is seen as hostile to full legalization approved by voters in eight states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — and the District of Columbia. One in five Americans now live in a state where pot is legal without a doctor’s prescription.

Driving the increase in support for legalizing casual use of weed among adults may be the ability to tax it. In Colorado, the first state to approve a ballot initiative legalizing recreational marijuana, the sales tax generated $506 million in tax revenue, according to VS Strategies, a pro-legalization research company based in Denver. More than 50 percent of the new tax revenue in Colorado is directed toward K-12 education, according to analysis. About 25 percent of the revenue is split between regulation and substance abuse prevention and treatment programs.

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