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| Marijuana could soon be legal in all 50 states. Image: Shutterstock |
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told the Huffington Post in an interview Monday that, “it’s game over in less than five years.”
With two states, Washington and Colorado, which allow for legal recreational use, and twenty more that allow legal medical use, marijuana
is becoming more relevant than ever to the political world.
A Gallup poll from Oct. 22 shows that for the first time,
Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana. Additionally, the Huffington
Post predicts that several more states are expected to legalize marijuana
within the next several years, including Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, and
California, in which the latter’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom, said that
pot should be legal.
Even Americans 65 and older, the only age group that still
opposes legalizing marijuana, are becoming more open to legalization, with
support jumping 14 percentage points since 2011, according to Gallup.
And the Obama Administration, while not having any intent to
legalize marijuana federally, has shifted its policy towards marijuana. In
addition to the Justice Department not challenging the legality of recreational
marijuana use in Colorado and Washington, provided that each state follows the
strict sale and distribution rules, the FDA recently ok’d a clinical trial that
will study the safety and efficacy of cannabidiol in children with severe
epilepsy, according to the Huffington Post.
Blumenauer pointed to Obama’s recent signing of the Farm Bill, which legalized industrial hemp production for research purposes, as
another indicator of the federal government backing down on the legal stance of
marijuana.
Perhaps this flexibility comes from the potential for legal
marijuana to become a booming industry, with one study predicting a $10 billion
a year industry by 2018. Colorado generated more than $14 million in its first
month of recreational marijuana sales alone.
Only time will tell how many more states follow Washington
and Colorado’s leads and what the response will be from the federal government,
if any.
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