Half of all Americans support the legalization of marijuana, the highest amount on record, according to a new Gallup poll.

The support of legalizing marijuana has grown among the younger, more liberal generation. According to Gallup’s survey, released Oct. 17, 62 percent of people ages 18-29 are in favor of legalizing the drug.

A Gallup poll last year found that 70 percent of people are in favor of letting doctors prescribe medical marijuana. If this trend continues, it may add pressure to align the nation’s laws with the people’s wishes, according to the survey.

Marijuana is considered to be the most commonly abused illicit drug in the United States. The drug consists of dried leaves and stems from the hemp plant, cannabis sativa. It’s known for its most active chemical, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse website.

Dessa Bergen-Cico, an assistant professor of public health in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, said the statistic about the legalization of marijuana makes sense in today’s society. She said she thought the support was so high because the more people that are exposed to the drug, the more it becomes used by the population.

She said she thinks marijuana is becoming more socially acceptable because generations growing up in the 1960s had a high probability of experimenting with it. She said those people have had a more realistic and less legalistic perspective on the drug.

‘Cannabis has no problems in that it doesn’t derail people,’ Bergen-Cico said about the drug. ‘It’s less problematic and less disruptive on a basic health perspective. You can’t smoke enough cannabis to kill yourself or overdose in a given instant.’

Bergen-Cico said marijuana is used to alleviate pain in people with glaucoma, wasting disease and multiple sclerosis. It also promotes weight gain in chemotherapy and anorexia patients, she said.

Still, Bergen-Cico said there are bad side effects and the threat of addiction to marijuana if used too often.

‘If they have difficulty getting to sleep without the use of cannabis, that’s often one of the side effects,’ she said, adding irritability and restlessness to the list. ‘The other aspect is that it does disorient when somebody’s driving, and heavy use of it can cause extreme apathy.’

Paul Whitman, a sophomore mechanical engineering major, said he thinks marijuana is a social thing to do and makes things funnier when hanging out with his roommates. He said he thought marijuana should be legalized because of the large amount of possession charges when marijuana users are nonviolent people.

‘The most annoying part of constantly smoking is people look down on marijuana so much more than alcohol when alcohol has killed more people, has led to more accidents,’ he said.

Whitman said Gallup’s survey shows that marijuana use is starting to be something that is taken seriously. He referenced a petition for the legalization of the drug on the White House website. The petition only needed 5,000 signatures before it could be reviewed by the Obama administration. As of Monday afternoon, it had 72,940 signatures.

mjberner@syr.edu

Published on October 24, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Maddy: mjberner@syr.edu