Healthy Living: You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time

A
survey released in March 2015 reveals 52 percent of Americans support the
legalization of cannabis. Not exactly breaking news as over the last couple of
years, mainstream polling organizations such as Gallup and Pew have
consistently found a majority of Americans supporting cannabis legalization.

What
is new about this poll is that it was conducted by the General Social Survey
(GSS) which, according to the Washington Post, is “widely considered to
represent the gold standard for public opinion research.”

GSS
is no ordinary polling firm. The company states that they conduct “basic
scientific research on the structure and development of American society with a
data-collection program designed to both monitor societal change within the
United States and to compare the United States to other nations.”

GSS
literally takes the pulse of America and has done so over the last four decades
mapping the course of U.S. drug policy since 1974, a year after the Shafer
Commission recommended decriminalizing the use of cannabis.

Thanks
to Dennis Peron and the pioneers of the medical cannabis movement, and the
ability of the internet to break the mainstream monopoly on news, Americans
have been taking off the government imposed blinders of “reefer madness.” People
now realize that cannabis is not dangerous and has significant medical
benefits.

More
than a decade ago, in 2002, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
conducted a poll asking “Should adults be allowed to legally use marijuana
for medical purposes if a physician recommends it?” A whopping 72 percent
said YES. This was over a decade ago, and the numbers have only increased.

Even medical doctors have joined the chorus of praise for
medical cannabis with 76 percent answering positively to a poll conducted by
the New England Journal of
Medicine asking “Do you
believe that the overall medicinal benefits of marijuana outweigh the risks and
potential harms?”

Polls have been so lopsided in favor of medical cannabis
across the board that hardly anyone even asks about it anymore. Medical
cannabis has become almost as sacrosanct as motherhood and apple pie.

The recognition that cannabis has medical benefits has
morphed into an understanding that legalization of cannabis has significant
health benefits.

A February 2014 Pew Research poll found 69 percent of
Americans recognize that alcohol is more dangerous than cannabis. Even more to
the point, 63 percent understand that if cannabis becomes legal and as widely
available as alcohol, that cannabis would still be safer than alcohol.

Although no polling data has been generated, this
widespread recognition of the safety of cannabis as compared to alcohol
translates into an understanding that even though cannabis use would increase
once it is legalized, that increase would not lead to more problems but could
even reduce the problems caused by alcohol as a result of increased cannabis
consumption and decreased alcohol use.

This understanding of the relative dangers of cannabis as
compared to alcohol comes from personal experience. A 2012 National Survey on
Drug Use and Health conducted by the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration
found that almost half (49 percent) of Americans say they have tried
cannabis,
with 12 percent stating they used it in the past year and a whopping 18.9
million Americans (7.3 percent) using cannabis the prior month.

With
that many Americans using cannabis,
almost everyone knows someone who uses cannabis—like the LGBT rights movement—when
people realized that their brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers were gay,
attitudes began to change, and the same holds true for cannabis use.

For
the last 80 years, government financed drug warriors have scared Americans into
not looking at the facts—threats of jail, job loss and social disapproval just
for even thinking that it shouldn’t be illegal. No more. You can fool some of
the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t
fool all of the people all of the time.