A record number of Americans think marijuana use should be legal, says a Gallup poll released yesterday. And government surveys published yesterday offered further indications that marijuana is moving into the mainstream nationally, nearly three years after Colorado voters legalized recreational pot, the Denver Post reports. Marijuana use among U.S. adults doubled over the past decade, rising to more than 22 million mostly recreational users, the surveys show. The results come from a comparison of health surveys from 2001-02 and 2012-13 sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Almost 80,000 adults aged 18 and older took part in face-to-face interviews about various health-related behaviors, said results published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
In 2015, 58 percent of Americans say cannabis use should be legal in the U.S., tying the highest acceptance numbers (from 2013) n Gallup's 46 years of asking Americans about marijuana. In 2014, the year between those record high pot polling percentages, 51 percent of Americans supported legalization. Gallup predicts Americans' support for legalization will only increase in the years to come. “Given the patterns of support by age, that percentage should continue to grow in the future,” said Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones. “Younger generations of Americans have been increasingly likely to favor legal use of marijuana as they entered adulthood compared with older generations of Americans when they were the same age decades ago. Now, more than seven in 10 of today's young adults support legalization.”