41% support legalization, 49% opposed

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 nationâ??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 â??gatewayâ? drug.

That â??gateway drugâ? argument sure is persistent, isnâ??t it? I guess I could give it a positive spin: at least if youâ??re relying on the â??gateway drugâ? argument to show how awful marijuana is, youâ??re tacitly admitting that the marijuana itself isnâ??t so harmful.

The only three effective tools left in the prohibitionistâ??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 Godâ??s Sake, wonâ??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 â??gateway drugâ? laughed out of the room like people who insist the moon landing was faked*.

Weâ??ll deal with â??stoned driversâ? and â??what about the childrenâ? another time. For your peers that shoot you the â??gateway drugâ? 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 â??gateway theoryâ? 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 wouldnâ??t have 46% of them believing the â??gateway theoryâ?.

The theory survives because it fits a pattern familiar to most people. They understand that the falling-down drunk whoâ??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 â?? accurately, Iâ??ll admit â?? 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. Theyâ??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 â??gateway theoryâ?:

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). â??For every 721 people whoâ??ve ever smoked pot, only 15 currently use cocaine and one uses heroin,â? you might say, â??how much of a gateway to addiction is it when only 2% of the people who ever try it use hard drugs?â? (Note: â??Gateway to addictionâ?, not â??gateway drugâ?. The latter sets the prohibitionistâ??s frame of marijuana as a drug like heroin and coke. The former frames the hard drugs as something youâ??ll get addicted to, but implicitly says if youâ??re using marijuana, you havenâ??t gotten to addiction yet.)

2) 721-49Â½. This is the ratio of people who have ever drank alcohol (204 million) to people who become alcoholics (14 million). â??For every 721 people who try alcohol, 49Â½ of them become alcoholics - or alcohol addicts,â? you continue. â??So how is it that beer isnâ??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!â? (With the combination of #1 & #2, weâ??re using their implicit understanding that marijuana is not such a big deal, because it is only its â??gatewayâ? 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. â??Even though almost 7% of the people who try alcohol become addicted, we learned from Prohibition that trying to stop people from drinking didnâ??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 canâ??t buy cocaine and heroin there. The only gateway with marijuana is to the illegal drug market, where everything is for sale.â?

This isnâ??t going to instantly convince most of them, because at its core, marijuana prohibition is a moral issue - you smoke pot, youâ??re a â??druggieâ?, no less morally repugnant than a cokehead or junkie; you drink beer, youâ??re â??Joe Sixpackâ?. But at least it defuses one of their junk-science justifications so we can get to the moral root of the issue.

*Seriously, youâ??re not one of those people who think the moon landing was faked, are you?