Clive Crook, Columnist

The U.S. Is Changing Its Mind About Marijuana

Most Americans now think that marijuana should be legalized.

May 30, 2013 at 9:55 PM UTC

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics. Previously, he was deputy editor of the Economist and chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times.

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Most Americans now think that marijuana should be legalized. A new paper for the Brookings Institution by Bill Galston and E.J. Dionne draws attention to this startling shift of public opinion: Support for legalization has surged by almost 20 percentage points in less than a decade and by 11 points in the past three years.

According to recent polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 52 percent of Americans favor legalization. Just 20 years ago, 80 percent of Americans opposed it. Note that these figures are for outright legalization. (Support for legalizing the medical, as opposed to recreational, use of marijuana is far stronger: 77 percent are currently for it.) Seven years ago, 50 percent of Americans thought that using marijuana was immoral; that has dropped to 32 percent.