Majority Of Cops Support Cannabis Legalization

Why an Overwhelming Majority of Police Want to See Cannabis Legalized from CannabisNet on Vimeo.

No, not all cops are after potheads.

A new survey released by the Pew Research Center analyzing data from thousands of police officers around the USA revealed that most cops support cannabis legalization.

Federal law dictates that cannabis is still a schedule 1 drug, which means it basically has no medicinal value and is a dangerous substance. Based on the research findings, 68% of cops think that cannabis should be legal in one way or another. Almost a third of the officers think that cannabis should be legalized for personal and medicinal uses while 37% think it should be legal for medicinal purposes only. Only 30% of the respondents think that cannabis shouldn’t be legal at all.

Despite these statistics, it seems that law enforcement agencies still aren’t completely sold about the benefits of cannabis legalization, not as much as the general public are. For the first time ever, the general public has been more supportive of cannabis, with 60% of the population supporting legal cannabis use.

Police officers across the country are now given the task of working with constantly changing and more relaxed laws about cannabis use. Recreational cannabis is already legal in 8 states as well as Washington DC, while 28 states now have a medical cannabis program. The very presence of these laws clearly reflect a progressive attitude towards cannabis consumption throughout the country, and more citizens are beginning to see the medicinal value of cannabis or at least recognizing that the plant isn’t more dangerous than regulated substances such as alcohol or cigarettes.

police and marijuana

Just because the public is becoming more relaxed towards cannabis doesn’t mean that the law enforcement community feels the same. There were over 574,000 arrests in 2015 alone just for the possession of small amounts of cannabis - a figure which shadows all the arrests that cops made for violent crimes in the same year. However, these figures give us a glimmer of hope especially when you consider the fact that law enforcement groups are usually the most aggressive and vocal about being anti-cannabis. Various law enforcement groups have made efforts over the past few years to prevent legalization, citing intoxicated driving or underage use as reasons.

Legalization will continue to be an issue especially as the federal government is transitioning between into a new administration. In 2009, President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder made moves to relax federal cannabis enforcement which set the foundation for many decriminalization and legalization moves in succeeding years. However given that President-elect Trump has nominated Jeff Sessions for attorney general, who has long been anti-legalization, we have yet to see how this is going to affect cannabis laws.