The cannabis prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) recently released a poll on American\u2019s rate of support for legalized cannabis.<\/p>\n
As you might expect from the Reefer Madness crowd, their\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0about the poll proudly claims, \u201c68 percent of Americans favor marijuana policies other than legalization.\u201d That result comes in stark contrast to the 66 percent of Americans\u00a0Gallop<\/a>\u00a0found who supported adult-use legalization, the 62 percent that\u00a0Pew<\/a>\u00a0found who support adult use legalization as well as the 63 percent who supported adult-use legalization and 93 percent that supported medical cannabis which\u00a0Quinnipiac<\/a>\u00a0found.<\/p>\n So why is there such a big difference? The answer lies in the fact that polling data can be read a lot of different ways. While SAM read\u00a0its data<\/a>\u00a0as saying \u201c68 percent of Americans favor marijuana policies other than legalization,\u201d it is important to understand how the organization reached that number. As opposed to past polling on the issue, like with Quinnipiac, where survey takers could choose that they supported both adult use and medical legalization, SAM\u2019s poll forced people to choose just one. Question five of the poll asks, \u201cWhich of the following federal marijuana policies do you favor?\u201d The four answers participants had to choose from are full legalization (33 percent), medical-only (39 percent), decriminalization (18 percent), and prohibition (11 percent).<\/p>\n To reach that 68 percent figure, SAM lumped together the people who support prohibition with those who want to see cannabis decriminalized and legalized for medical use. So not only was the poll constructed in such a way as to pit adult use cannabis legalization against medical legalization, SAM presented its findings in the most misleading way possible. Kevin Sabet, the president of SAM, has even\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t like the term decriminalization, because it\u2019s used interchangeably with legalization.\u201d Given that SAM<\/a> recognizes that decriminalization is a form of legalization, it is odd that they would lump it together with prohibition to reach that 68 percent figure from their press release.<\/p>\n A more accurate way to read Project SAM\u2019s data is that a poll funded by a prohibitionist group found that 89 percent of Americans oppose prohibition. Another way to read the data is that 72 percent of Americans support either full legalization or medical-only cannabis legalization. That 72 percent support for legalization in some form is more in line with what previous polls found than the 68 percent opposition to legalization that SAM claimed in their press release.<\/p>\n Now that cannabis is legal in some form in\u00a0over two-thirds of states<\/a>\u00a0and that strong majorities of Americans support legalization in every major poll being conducted, SAM seems so desperate for relevancy that it has resorted to distorting polling data to try and prove a point. This sort of deceptive\u00a0twisting of scientific data<\/a>\u00a0is nothing new to SAM but this polling shows a renewed desperation, the death rattle of a failed political movement whose own poll doesn\u2019t even show a third of the U.S. supporting the organization\u2019s cause. Cannabis advocates should be grateful to SAM for spending all that money doing this poll, and conclusively showing that 89 percent of Americans disagree with their message and think cannabis prohibition is wrong.<\/p>\n SAM\u2019s panic makes sense since sources ranging from former congressman\u00a0Dana Rohrabacher<\/a>, Kevin Murphy<\/a>\u00a0the CEO of Acreage Holdings and even\u00a0Anthony \u201cThe Mooch\u201d Scaramucci<\/a>\u00a0have all predicted that 2019 will be the year for cannabis legalization and that Donald Trump will be the man to do it. As legalized cannabis is one of the few bipartisan issues Trump could try to make happen for an easy Republican win going into re-election, he would be a moron not to try it, especially since\u00a0all 2020 Democratic candidates<\/a>\u00a0have expressed support for legalizing cannabis. If Donald Trump doesn\u2019t legalize cannabis this year, it is predicted to be unlikely that he won\u2019t be able to attract enough swing voters to be re-elected, which means legalizing cannabis could be a political victory that goes to the Democrats after the 2020 election.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, do you think Trump will legalize cannabis?<\/p>\n The post The SAM Old Half-Truths About Cannabis Legalization<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The cannabis prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) recently released a poll on American\u2019s rate of support for legalized cannabis. As you might expect from the Reefer Madness crowd, their\u00a0press release\u00a0about the poll proudly claims, \u201c68 percent of Americans favor marijuana policies other than legalization.\u201d That result comes inContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3922,8738,50,1349,119,687,4552,3105,3949,1438],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33314,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33313\/revisions\/33314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: The SAM Old Half-Truths About Cannabis Legalization<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"