For the first time in more than four decades of surveying national attitudes towards marijuana, the Pew Research Center announced today that a majority of Americans believe that pot should be legal. Pew’s latest phone survey, conducted over the course of five days last month, found that 52 percent of Americans support pot legalization and 45 percent oppose it.
The most surprising support for tokers’ rights came from some of the most socially conservative parts of America. Among residents of the 26 states that have not decriminalized pot or enacted medical marijuana legislation, a whopping 50 percent backed legalization in the poll, compared to only 47 percent who opposed it.
Shifting views on cannabis have a lot to do with changing demographics. The gigantic Millennial generation supports legalization at a rate of nearly 3 to 1. Yet Boomers’ views have also shifted, or, you might say, boomeranged: In 1978, 47 percent of Boomers favored legalization, but their support plummeted to 17 percent by 1990 before slowly inching back up, finally hitting the 50 percent mark just this year.
As memories of Reefer Madness and the ’60s culture wars continue to fade, more Americans are divorcing pot smoking from notions of morality:
Instead of a crusade against the devil, Americans increasingly view the war on weed in economic terms—and they don’t like what they see. A full 72 percent of poll respondents agreed that “government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more then they are worth.”
