Rasmussen: 41% support legalization, 49% opposed
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:20 am | By: Radical Russ
Forty-one percent (41%) of likely U.S. voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana to help solve the nation’s fiscal problems.
However, nearly half (49%) oppose this idea, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
These results show little difference from a survey conducted in February that asked Americans about legalization only. At that time, 40% said marijuana should be legalized, but 46% disagreed.
Over half of Democrats (52%) support the idea of legalizing and taxing pot, but only 28% of Republicans agree. Most GOP voters (65%) are against the idea, as are 37% of Democrats. Unaffiliated voters are more evenly divided: 41% are in favor of the idea and 47% are opposed to it.
Adults between the ages of 18 and 40 are much more likely to support legalizing and taxing marijuana than those over 40.
The new survey also shows that nearly half of voters (46%) believe marijuana use leads to use of harder drugs. Thirty-seven percent (37%) do not see marijuana as a “gateway” drug.
That “gateway drug” argument sure is persistent, isn’t it? I guess I could give it a positive spin: at least if you’re relying on the “gateway drug” argument to show how awful marijuana is, you’re tacitly admitting that the marijuana itself isn’t so harmful.
The only three effective tools left in the prohibitionist’s rhetorical arsenal are:
- Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of harder drugs.
- If we legalized marijuana, our streets would be filled with stoned drivers!
- What about the children? For God’s Sake, won’t somebody think of the children?
So it is up to us to educate our friends and family and elected representatives. We need to have people who bring up “gateway drug” laughed out of the room like people who insist the moon landing was faked*.
We’ll deal with “stoned drivers” and “what about the children” another time. For your peers that shoot you the “gateway drug” argument, you could tell them that the Institute of Medicine debunked this theory in 1999 and every study subsequent to it has agreed. Or you could point out that the “gateway theory” is a logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (that since this came before that, this caused that). But if your peers were swayed by logic and reason, we wouldn’t have 46% of them believing the “gateway theory”.
The theory survives because it fits a pattern familiar to most people. They understand that the falling-down drunk who’s loaded on scotch was once probably a guy who drank a beer or two. They understand that the chain smoker was once probably a guy who had a cigarette now and then. They understand that the right-wing talk radio host who was downing 30 illegal Oxycontin a day probably started on one or two a day. They also realize — accurately, I’ll admit — that the crack addict and heroin junkie probably smoked a joint or two before they moved on to the hard stuff.
So the way you attack this is to flip the perspective. They’re looking at all the hard drug addicts and noting that almost all of them used pot. You need to make them see all the marijuana users and show how few actually use hard drugs. Here are your three rhetorical attacks on the “gateway theory”:
1) 721-15-1. This is the ratio of people who have ever smoked marijuana (95.9 million) to people who used cocaine last month (2 million) and people who used heroin last month (133,000). “For every 721 people who’ve ever smoked pot, only 15 currently use cocaine and one uses heroin,” you might say, “how much of a gateway to addiction is it when only 2% of the people who ever try it use hard drugs?” (Note: “Gateway to addiction”, not “gateway drug”. The latter sets the prohibitionist’s frame of marijuana as a drug like heroin and coke. The former frames the hard drugs as something you’ll get addicted to, but implicitly says if you’re using marijuana, you haven’t gotten to addiction yet.)
2) 721-49½. This is the ratio of people who have ever drank alcohol (204 million) to people who become alcoholics (14 million). “For every 721 people who try alcohol, 49½ of them become alcoholics – or alcohol addicts,” you continue. “So how is it that beer isn’t considered a gateway to addiction when three times as many of its users become addicted? 6.8% of people who try alcohol become alcoholics, while only 2% of people who try pot become coke or heroin addicts!” (With the combination of #1 & #2, we’re using their implicit understanding that marijuana is not such a big deal, because it is only its “gateway” to coke and heroin that scares them.)
3) 0. This is the number of different hard, addictive illegal drugs available at your local liquor store. “Even though almost 7% of the people who try alcohol become addicted, we learned from Prohibition that trying to stop people from drinking didn’t stop anyone and only created violent crime and moonshine that would blind you. So we control alcohol at the liquor store, check IDs, and we make sure that people can’t buy cocaine and heroin there. The only gateway with marijuana is to the illegal drug market, where everything is for sale.”
This isn’t going to instantly convince most of them, because at its core, marijuana prohibition is a moral issue – you smoke pot, you’re a “druggie”, no less morally repugnant than a cokehead or junkie; you drink beer, you’re “Joe Sixpack”. But at least it defuses one of their junk-science justifications so we can get to the moral root of the issue.
*Seriously, you’re not one of those people who think the moon landing was faked, are you?
Topics: gateway drug, gateway theory, joe sixpack, prohibition, Rasmussen
That poll is way low and wrong I’m sure. It also said that 45% of Californians think pot should be Legalized while 46% oppose. Plus they obviously talked to an ignorant bunch. Their 2 main reasons not to Legalize clearly show lack of proper and factual education by the media.
Rasmussen leans right. Zogby leans left. Rasmussen’s polls tend to be pretty accurate though for predicting outcomes of elections and ballot initiatives. Poll results vary depending on who is taking the poll, how they ask the questions, who they ask, and how they weight their data. They all monkey with the data a little. They’ll survey 1,000 people out of many millions and they’ll always end up with some group being overrepresented in their sample, like too many Republicans or too many Democrats or too many young people, etc. They all have their voodoo ways of trying to compensate for overrepresented demographics which can actually skew their results and make them less of an accurate gauge of the opinions of the people.
Look at the marijuana legalization polls over the last few months. We had one CBS poll I believe that said nationwide 38% of the voting aged population supports legalizing marijuana, and one from Zogby that said 52% are for legalizing marijuana. Then there have been several other polls and in all of them forty some odd percent of those polled support legalization, usually somewhere in the low to mid forties. You can’t really believe the polls that much but with so many showing nationwide support for legalizing in the low to mid forties I think it’s a pretty safe bet right now that somewhere between 40 and 45% of the voting aged public in this country support legalizing marijuana, probably closer to 45%.
Personally, I just ignore the really low percentage in the CBS poll and the high percentage in the recent Zogby poll because they just aren’t in line with all the other polls. The politicians who need to see support from the people before they will act aren’t going to believe that one Zogby poll either. They have to see that the trend is that support for legalizing is has been increasing since the early Nineties and that it is increasing at an even faster pace now than in years past. When we start seeing several polls coming back with greater than 50% support for legalization, then we’re going to see politicians really taking notice.
Rasmussen does one thing that ticks me off when they report these poll results. This is the second time in the last few months they’ve done a poll asking legalization questions and made some comment about how there is so much more support from those under 40 than those 40 and older. That’s very misleading. Of course there is less support from those 40 and older because that group includes those 65 and older who in most cases are strongly opposed to legalization. Only a small fraction of them support it. The under 40 group includes those 18 to 29, a slightly larger group of people than the 65 and older group, who always have much higher levels of support for legalization than older age groups. For years now the majority of 18 to 29 year olds have been for legalizing marijuana. But if you were to look at people in their thirties, forties, fifties, and maybe even those in their early sixties you’d see that there isn’t that much variation in levels of support in these groups.
One poll of just Ohioans that came out recently had 37% of Ohioans for legalizing marijuana. When they broke down the age demographics you could see that 37% those 30 through 45 supported legalization and a slightly higher percentage, 38%, of those 46 through 64 were for legalizing. There was 59% support for legalizing from those 18 to 29 and only 12% of those 65 and older were for it. Those 65 and older were very much against it, with 72% saying they were “strongly opposed” and only 15% who were just “somewhat opposed.” So, 87% were opposed and the vast majority of them were strongly opposed.
You’d see the same basic dynamics in a national poll if they broke the demographics down for all of us to see. But Rasmussen has to come out and make it look like people in their forties and fifties are really against legalization, and I think perhaps that’s because they want to influence politicians who tend to worry more about what older voters think because they are the ones who actually exercise their right to vote even in mid term elections.
http://www.ipr.uc.edu/documents/op050809.pdf
Screw Joe six-pack, I’m Johnny Bong!
The idea that it’s a moral issue is just a front for the real driving force. The war on marijuana is nothing more than a thinly veiled war on dissent. Marijuana is often associated with the bleeding hearts and artists. Those who might question they way things are done. It would be unconstitutional to ban dissent and deviance in this country, so this facade called the drug war was created to allow the government to oppress a certain type of people in the name of supposed public safety.
If people in this country could look at this issue objectively, they would see that in truth it is behavior that we usually only attribute to totalitarian dictatorships. That’s why the founding fathers made sure the government couldn’t do this when they wrote the constitution.
But Nixon really didn’t like those hippies, so the constitution was long ago thrown out the window.
Very well put. Ron Reagan Jr. once said, “The illegality of marijuana rests less on what it is than what it represents: nature, dissent, introspection. It’s not marijuana the mildly psychotropic weed we condemn, but marijuana the nemesis of the state.” You can feel it anytime you hear a Joe Sixpack comment on a marijuana arrest, “Well, you knew that marijuana’s illegal, right?” An authority set the rules, you broke the rules, you get punished, simple as that. Joe Sixpack doesn’t question the necessity or wisdom of the rule; that’s above his pay grade.
Or as my Dad once observed, “If you need a few hundred thousand boys to fight an overseas war for oil, who do you think will volunteer, beer drinkers or pot smokers?”
P.S. Primus sucks!
In 1998, the World Health Organization stated emphatically that the gateway theory between adolescent marijuana use and heroin use is “the least likely of all hypotheses”.
..end of argument.
LEGALIZE MARIJUANA. Treat it like alcohol plain and simple.
I’m so sick of the Gateway Drug Argument. Alcohol is the ULTIMATE GATEWAY DRUG. It’s probably 90% of people’s first buzz. And if they like it, the want more. None of my successful friends that smoke got into heavy drugs like coke.
Once it’s legal it will be exciting for the first 3 months. After that, the people who smoke now, will probably smoke the same amount. And the people who won’t, simply won’t. Not much will change.
And if treated like alcohol. Kids will have as much access to it as a 6 pack of beer.
So legalize it. And to the folks that say NO and that have never done it, what right do they have to judge it?
The only reason that it’s bad for society is because there’s a black market that creates crime.