I'm fairly certain she's a "yes" on legalization. (Flickr/Jonathan Piccolo)
The Pew Research Center has a new poll out on marijuana legalization, and in many ways it's about what you'd expect if you've been paying attention to public opinion on this topic lately. Overall support for legalization is at 53 percent, and young people are more supportive than older people, among other things. We might have expected this movement simply on the basis of generational replacement-the "silent generation," those now over 70, were really the last ones to have no experience whatsoever with the drug, while everyone after has.
In the poll, 19 percent of those older people say they've tried marijuana, compared to 59 percent of the next generation, the baby boomers. Even if you yourself didn't try it, if many people you know have, you're probably aware that it doesn't turn people into psychotic maniacs a la "Reefer Madness" or send them rushing to take heroin after their first puff. That would at least make you open to considering legalization, and as more of those older people die off and are replaced by young people among whom pot is commonplace, support for legalization in the public as a whole was destined to rise.
But there's something else I found more interesting, and it's revealed in the bottom graph in this pair:
What we have here isn't just generational replacement, though that is present (in the difference between the bottom line and the others). It's also the change within each cohort, roughly since 1992 or so, when Bill Clinton got elected and the triumph of the hippies was complete. The fact that those lines go up means that people are actually changing their minds.
Why? The simplest answer is that we had an ongoing debate about it, and the pro-legalization side got the better of that debate. It's tempting (and sometimes correct) to scoff when someone says they want to have a "national conversation" or "initiate a debate" about something, because that's often a poor substitute for action. But in some cases, an extended debate really does produce change. That seems to be what has happened here.
