(Denver Business Journal) According to the telephone survey of 500 likely Colorado voters, 49 percent believe that marijuana should be legalized and taxed, while 39 percent disagree and 13 percent are undecided.

Pulse Opinion Research LLC conducted the survey for Rasmussen on May 10, and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Nationwide, Rasmussen’s poll a year ago found support for marijuana legalization at 41%.  But in Colorado, where medical marijuana use has exploded recently and a flood of marijuana dispensaries have flourished, nearly a majority support legalization.  In California where dispensaries have been the norm for years, a recent poll found support for legalization at 56%

For years the prohibitionists told us that medical marijuana was the “camel’s nose under the tent” and a “Trojan Horse” for all-out marijuana legalization.  I always responded with, “You mean if a few sick people are allowed legal marijuana, a majority of voters would see it wasn’t anything to fear and would support more people being allowed legal marijuana?  You’re afraid the people will discover you have been lying about marijuana and the only way to guarantee they don’t is to make sure not even chemotherapy and AIDS patients smoke a doobie?”

Maybe Utah and Idaho will never choose to re-legalize, but is that any reason to stop California and Colorado from doing so?

Opponents of medical marijuana in states that have registries (e.g., Oregon, Colorado) often point to the rapid growth in participation numbers and say, “See!  Rampant abuse of medical marijuana!  The medical-excuse marijuana people said there’d only be 500 cancer patients using it!  Now we have a bajillion people using it for supposed ‘pain’, most of ‘em young and healthy!”  (I’m paraphrasing the Oregon county sheriff I saw on video at a town-hall meeting to replace medical marijuana with a Marinol program… I’ll have that posted very soon!)

Never mind figuring out how these people, usually law enforcement or politicians, can tell those young healthy people don’t have epilepsy, irritable bowel, or recurring migraines on sight alone.  I don’t play Capt. Louis Renault and act all shocked – shocked, d’ya hear! – at the possibility that some twenty-something might exaggerate a symptom to score a medical marijuana card. I’ve always just pointed out that in any bureaucratic system there is the chance for fraud and when you’re carving out a legal exception to prison time, there’s a hell of an incentive to commit fraud.

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Then I ask them to examine what exactly this “abuse” means.  You have a pot smoker who is currently buying weed on the underground market.  Now he goes into a clinic, pays a fee, and sees a doctor.  Then he goes to the State Office Building and pays $100 to the state, gives his name and address and the address where he’ll be keeping his marijuana.  Now maybe he grows his own cannabis or has a caregiver do it for him.  We’ve taken an unknown guy who was funneling money underground, had him see a doctor, generate jobs and tax revenue, give money to the state, and provided him a way to avoid sending money underground.  We’ve also removed from the state the burden to investigate, prosecute, and imprison him for doing this!  A few years ago Oregon took nearly a million dollars of medical marijuana program fee money and redirected to other budget shortfalls… I don’t recall them crying much about “abuse” back then.

If the prohibitionists were right, the relaxation of marijuana prosecutions thanks to medical marijuana should have led to disasters so clear the voters would react.  Instead we find that support for medical marijuana tops 80% in some polls and the states with the oldest and most generous medical laws are now approaching and topping majority support for outright legalization!

Hey, any time more than half of Americans think something good about marijuana, we're happy.

…but 44% think marijuana is equally as dangerous or more dangerous than alcohol!

Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.

But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.

Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.

Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.

This finding surprised me, as I figured parents with kids at home would be more likely to succumb to reefer madness hysteria.  Is it really possible that a majority of parents would rather catch their kid smoking a joint than drinking a beer?

As California looks for solutions to its ongoing budget problems, 47% of voters in the state say marijuana should be legalized and taxed. Nearly as many (42%) oppose the state legalizing and taxing the drug.

Nationally, 41% of likely voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana, but 49% are opposed.

President Obama’s new drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has signaled a shift away from the decades-old war on drugs toward more emphasis on health treatment for drug users. However, 54% of voters say illegal drug use is primarily a criminal justice issue rather than a matter of public health.

This I would attribute to the other illegal drugs and the tendency of their users to commit more crimes.  I’d like to see the question narrowed down to just marijuana use; is it an issue of public health or criminal justice?

Only 28% of voters believe that the legalization of marijuana in the United States would help to reduce drug-related violence in Mexico.

This number shows that we haven’t done a good enough job educating people about the contribution of marijuana to the profits of the Mexican cartels.  Even with Arizona’s attorney general and others estimating 60%-70% of cartel profits stem from marijuana trafficking, it seems the people haven’t gotten the word.  They also may believe that even if we did dry up their major funding source through marijuana legalization that the cartels would just shift their profits and violence to controlling the trafficking of hard drugs.  Nobody ever stops to consider how the cartels are going to magically create millions of new American cocaine and heroin users to make up for the loss of marijuana business, especially when marijuana users would have greater access to a better product under legalization.

There is a reason there is no Cocaine Culture or Heroin Times magazines.  Cocaine and heroin use most often are addictions; marijuana use is most often a lifestyle.

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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:

1. Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of harder drugs.
2. If we legalized marijuana, our streets would be filled with stoned drivers!
3. 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?

A Rasmussen Reports poll released this week shows that 40% of Americans have joined with such public figures as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper in saying that marijuana should be legal. 

Interestingly, legalization enjoys its greatest support among those Americans who refuse to identify with either major political party. According to Rasmussen:

Sixty percent (60%) of Republicans are opposed to the legalization of marijuana. Democrats are more evenly split on the question, giving legalization the edge by five points….

Among adults not affiliated with either major political party, 49% favor legalization of marijuana, while 41% oppose it.

While Democratic politicians have usually proven more willing than Republicans to discuss alternatives to prohibition, policy is another matter. Former Democratic President Bill Clinton initiated federal raids against medical marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized marijuana for medical uses, and current Attorney General Eric Holder has long been an enthusiastic booster of harsh drug policies. So it’s not surprising that unaffiliated and third-party voters would show the strongest support for legalization.

Now if only we didn’t have a political system that almost mathematically and financially guarantees third parties don’t have a chance.