In Texas, the legal marijuana opposition is constantly dropping. Now only about one in five respondents in the latest poll by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune said that they are against any kind of legalization of marijuana.
Over the last two years, the support for only medical use of marijuana has dropped but for legalization of it for private use in any size of amounts has grown tremendously since February 2015 when the pollsters were asked about this earlier.
At University of Austin, Texas professor of government, Daron Shaw said that they have seen this exact move before on some other social issues. He is the poll’s co-director and he thinks that these changes in the state are more because attitudes of people are shifting and not because other states have started legalizing marijuana. A little bit of normalization is there, but that isn’t an issue of states as laboratories and voters don’t actually care about all this.
About 83 percent overall Texans are now supporting the legalization of marijuana for some kind of use and about 53 percent believed that medical marijuana should be allowed possession for any kind of use. About two years ago, around 24 percent Texans said that there should be no marijuana for usage in a legal way and about 34 percent believed that it should be allowed only for use in a medical perspective.
The popularity of legal weed is more among Democrats as compared to Republicans. More men want legal marijuana as compared to women. Younger Texans are more inclined towards legal pot as compared to the old ones. These subgroups support marijuana legalization for both medical as well as nonmedical usage.
The co-director of the poll, Jim Henson said that the people who want marijuana to stay completely illegal have now a decreased number by about seven points. He runs the Politics Project at the University. This shift is because of the Republicans in small amounts that say that it should be legal and people who said that any kind of amount should be legal, which increased by about six points.
He also said that there may be another thing going on here, which is the medium ground’s possible disappearance. This reminded him of what happened with the concept of gay marriage. In that too, the people often chose the option by the civil union. A similar kind of thing is most probably happening with the concept of medical marijuana.