COLUMBIA – These days it seems like Americans can’t agree on much. But one thing that most people agree on is marijuana.
Recent polling by Pew Research Center, a non-partisan fact tank, showed 91% of Americans believe marijuana should be legal in one form or another.
This follows President Joe Biden’s move on Thursday to pardon thousands of people convicted with marijuana possession and promised to review marijuana’s classification as a schedule 1 drug. That’s the same category as heroin and LSD. To classify marijuana in the same way as those drugs is now largely out of step with public perception.
Jacob Felson, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University said a lot of Americans now associate marijuana with, “Boomers with bad backs looking for pain relief.”
Felson co-wrote a paper on how that wasn’t always the case. “When we think of how attitudes have changed from the early 1970s through to today, we think of race, gender, same-sex marriage and then marijuana is one of those things. And I think the change in marijuana is quieter than these other things.”
In 1969, the first year Gallup polled on the issue, only 12% of Americans believed marijuana should be legalized. Public opinion stayed pretty much the same until the 1990s, when the conversation around legalization began to change.
“There’s really been a sea change in the way [marijuana] was framed” said Felson. “It would be mentioned in the same breath as heroin and cocaine. Now, since 1991 there’s been a complete change. Now, it’s much, much more about medical, it’s medical uses.”
Wesley Hall, inventory supervisor at the Shangri-La Cannabis SuperStore in Columbia, said he’s seeing the same things. Hall has been working at Shangri-La for a little over a year. Even during that short amount of time Hall said he’s seen a lot of change.
“You can definitely tell the perception of the industry has changed, pretty greatly,” Hall said. “Beyond our customer base I see it in the public too, it’s become a lot more accepted.”
In 2018 Missouri became the 32nd state to legalize medical marijuana. Dispensary sales in Missouri have increased every single month since it began in October of 2020. And in total, the state has recorded $494.14 million in sales.
Hall thinks Missourians are becoming more comfortable with the idea of weed as medicine.
“People were kind of wary to walk into a dispensary and do something that’s been illegal for so long,” Hall said. “I see people coming in here just like they’d come in to pick up a prescription now, when before you could kind of tell some people felt like they were kind of doing something wrong.”
Travis Lehenbauer is familiar with that perspective. The Hallsville native said growing up his family told him marijuana was a gateway drug. Today, Lehenbauer uses medical marijuana to help him sleep and deal with back pain.
“Ever since COVID I’ve felt like it’s helped a lot,” Lehenbaur said. “And it has a bad perception on people, and people need to just give it a second chance basically.”
Missourians will get that second chance in November when they vote on whether to make recreational marijuana use legal.
Professor Felson said there could be a future where people think of lighting up just like drinking a beer.
“We may look back at the time where marijuana was illegal the way we look back at alcohol prohibition. As something that seems just kind of, strange,” Felson said.
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