Galluping Toward Legalized Marijuana

American attitudes about legalizing marijuana are relaxing. Why, and what does it mean? 

Guest Column:

As Americans relax their attitudes about the issue of legalizing marijuana—a latest national poll indicates that 44 percent favor decriminalization, demonstrating a growing trend—demodirt.com welcomes the expert perspective of Chicago-based attorney James E. Gierach, a former Cook County, IL prosecutor and board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Consisting of more than 12,000 police officers, prosecutors, judges, FBI, DEA agents, among others, LEAP  seeks to change the discourse on drug policy issues to include the concept of legalization. The following is Gierach's response to the Gallup findings, in his own words.

A recent Gallup poll, showing that Americans are galloping ever closer to a majority view that favors the legalization of marijuana, reflects a change of national conscience for a host of social, political, cultural and economic reasons.    

The poll notes that seniors (age 65 years and up) – or, say, people past college age and already too old for Woodstock when it happened, and people too old to have smoked a Vietnamese or Cambodian joint while at war in the late 60’s or early 70’s – oppose marijuana except for 28 percent of the older codgers who favor it.  This intolerance compares to the “younger generation” that favors marijuana legalization by 45 to 50 percent, depending on age bracket.  The lesson from this age-based disparity of thought: one cannot learn from experience that one has not had.   

Politically, some iconic liberals and conservatives have long and heartily favored marijuana legalization.  For example, the late arch-conservative William F. Buckley and the liberal Sen. Tom Hayden both favored legalizing marijuana.  It shouldn’t be surprising that political extremes can reach round the circle of life to hold hands in common appreciation of legalized marijuana, one extreme believing that government has its hand where it doesn’t belong and the other believing that the individual has the right to be free of the government’s touch.

However, according to this most recent Gallup poll, 78 percent of liberals favor marijuana legalization while 72 percent of conservatives oppose it.  Perhaps conservatives started the new millennium on the intolerant wrong foot with the Bush/Rush religious and right-wing dominance of the Republican Party and with the misconceived belief that drug-war prohibition had moral underpinnings, despite the substance lapses suffered by both these leaders and the clear, societal, personal decay that comes from informant-based law-enforcement, a drug-war mainstay.

This liberal-conservative (78% pro – 72% con) and matching Democratic-Republican (54% pro – 70% con) dichotomy of thought is best understood in the context of the drug-war’s supposed morality-based and religious underpinnings, where drug prohibition was designed to save the kids from the so-called Gateway drug, marijuana, just as the alcohol temperance movement had its moral and religious base.  However, as the drug-war years have droned on like a bad infection without cure or improvement, gradually, more and more “middle-roaders” have gravitated to the more-freedom and smaller-government camps, helping to form a new, more tolerant majority view where overall, 44% of Americans favor the legalization of marijuana and 54% are yet opposed.

Geographically, American’s West, Northwest, and East, state-by-state, by initiative and by legislative act, have approved medical marijuana and learned that the world did not end even though many Americans had marched through the Marijuana Gateway, over the persistent protestations of one Washington drug czar after another.  Only Chicago , the Midwest and points south suffer an Al Capone-like hangover that exudes a compassionless stupor that, as of yet, still resists even medical marijuana for the sick and dying.  But even there, Michigan has broken the ice and common sense is prohibition stultifying against a backdrop of nearly 900,000 marijuana arrests a year.   

Even ignoring the squandered cost of imprisoning oodles of “marijuana criminals” who buy and sell marijuana consensually, as the poll suggests those polled do, thinking people across America have learned from personal experience and myriad testimonials from medical marijuana patients and their medically-credentialed care managers that one of God’s (Nature’s) plant-creations just isn’t that criminal.