Who Will Legalize Marijuana Next Week?

A week
before Election Day, it looks like at least one of the four major
marijuana initiatives will pass, while the other three races are
too close to call. Here is a rundown of the latest polling,
arranged by likelihood of passage:

Washington, D.C. Initiative 71, which would
make it legal for adults 21 or older to possess up to two ounces of
marijuana and grow up to six plants at home, enjoyed a 2-to-1
advantage in a
Washington Post poll conducted last month, with
only 2 percent undecided. As I
noted at the time, the initiative’s prospects were boosted by a
dramatic reversal of opinion among black voters in recent years,
presumably driven by concerns about the racially disproportionate
impact of marijuana prohibition. Despite this groundswell of
support, the fate of marijuana legalization in the nation’s capital
ultimately will be up to Congress, which can always override
anything that D.C. voters approve.

Oregon. A new
Oregonian poll puts support for Measure 91, which would legalize
commercial production and distribution as well as possession and
use, at 44 percent, with 46 percent opposed, with 7 percent
undecided and 2 percent declining to say. That two-point difference
is within the poll’s margin of error, so the results suggest a dead
heat. By comparison, a
poll conducted earlier in October, commissioned by Oregon
Public Broadcasting and the Fox station in Portland, put support at
52 percent, with 41 percent opposed and 7 percent undecided. The
sample in the latter poll was somewhat younger, based on different
projections of who will vote. Turnout by younger voters, who are
consistently more likely to support legalization, could be crucial
to the outcome.

Alaska. Surveys by Public Policy Polling
put support for Measure 2, which like Oregon’s initiative would
create a legal marijuana industry, at 48 percent in
May and 44 percent in
August. A few weeks ago supporters and opponents of Measure 2
released
dueling poll results showing the initiative winning by eight
points and losing by 10 points, respectively. In a survey by
pollster Ivan Moore, 57 percent of voters favored legalization,
while 39 percent opposed it. A Dittman Research poll put support at
43 percent and opposition at 53 percent. Both showed 4 percent of
voters undecided. The wording of the poll questions was somewhat
different. The Ivan Moore survey mentioned the elimination of
criminal penalties for possession of up to an ounce and noted that
“constitutional protections allowing home cultivation would be
preserved,” a reference to the 1975 Alaska
Supreme Court ruling that said the state constitution allows
people to possess marijuana for personal use in the privacy of
their homes.

Florida. Support for Amendment 2, which would make
Florida the first Southern state to approve medical use of
marijuana, seems to have
plummeted since July, when a Quinnipiac University
poll found that 88 percent of voters favored the measure. A

Gravis Marketing poll conducted last week puts support at 50
percent. As a constitutional amendment, the initiative needs 60
percent to pass. “Medical marijuana is done,” Gravis Marketing’s
managing partner
told the Orlando Sentinel. “It will not pass.” For
those
clinging to hope, United We Care, the Amendment 2 campaign,
cites an Anzalone
Liszt Grove poll it commissioned that puts support at 62
percent. The latter poll used the actual ballot language, while the
Gravis Marketing poll used a summary.

The New York Times notes
that the opposition has been well-funded only in Florida, thanks
mainly to $5 million in support from Republican casino tycoon
Sheldon Adelson. But before you conclude that money makes all the
difference, note that the campaign for the Washington, D.C.,
initiative has
virtually none.

The Times lends credence to complaints by
opponents of Oregon’s Measure 91 that they have been silenced
because critics
objected when they tried to use taxpayer money to campaign
against the initiative. At a recent anti-pot event in Keizer, the
Times says, “no one even mentioned Measure 91,”
because “audience participants and organizers, many of them from
government-funded nonprofit groups involved in drug treatment
services, were afraid of violating laws that ban politicking with
public money.” Clatsop Couny District Attorney Joshua Marquis, a
leading opponent of Measure 91, claims “they’ve done a pretty good
job of shutting everybody up.”

Please. If you address an audience of Oregon voters right before
an election in which marijuana legalization is on the ballot, and
you go on and on about the menace that marijuana poses to the youth
of Oregon, you need not explicitly say “vote no on Measure 91” to
get your message across. And if these anti-pot activists want to be
freed from the shackles of self-censorship, all they have to do is
spend their own money instead of using resources forcibly extracted
from taxpayers. Evidently it’s hard to find people who will
voluntarily part with their hard-earned money in support of the
prohibitionist cause. Marquis whines than the No on 91 folks have
“no sugar daddy” like Adelson. And as the
Times notes, “Opponents were, by their own admission,
late in forming a united organization.” It seems that 77 years of
prohibition have fostered complacency as well as a tendency to rely
on government support among the busybodies who insist on using
force to stop people from getting high.