"Will Pot Be Legal By The End Of This Decade?"

The interesting question in the title of this post comes from the headline of this new piece at The Crime Report authored by Stephen Gutwillig, who is California director of the Drug Policy Alliance (which is a national advocacy group that was a big supporter of California's marijuana legalization inititive.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

Easily the most-watched initiative on the 2010 ballot nationwide, Prop. 19 drew 46.5 percent of the vote, a new record for marijuana legalization.  Attracting more than 4.6 million votes, it easily out-polled California’s ill-fated zillionaire Gubernatorial and Senate candidates, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, with a tiny fraction of their extraordinary war chests.

In the wake of the vote, national marijuana reform advocates were immediately heartened, if not emboldened, by the prospects for ending decades of failed, punitive prohibitionist policies.  That’s because Prop. 19 fared surprisingly well in the face of a truly inhospitable electoral climate.

Midterm election voters traditionally skew older and more conservative than the much larger electorate that can be expected to vote in a Presidential election. While there had been hopes that a surge of younger reform-minded voters would defy conventional wisdom, the Prop. 19 campaign didn’t have nearly enough advertising dollars to shift entrenched voting patterns in a state as large as California.

In the face of these structural obstacles, the record-setting 46.5 percent flouted the expectations of most sophisticated political observers in the state.  What’s more, recent polling indicates just how close the marijuana reform issue is to widespread success....[and] Newsweek found that a commanding 70 percent of voters under 30 nationally would support a Prop. 19-style reform in their state.

Even in defeat, Proposition 19 legitimized marijuana legalization as a serious, mainstream political issue. The international media coverage was intense, informed and incessant.  What’s more, last year’s campaign served as a national template for building a new reform coalition that included prominent civil rights organizations and labor unions calling for an end to these wasteful, ineffective policies that also disproportionately target African Americans and Latinos.

As a result, a flurry of marijuana legalization initiatives is already on the drawing board in a number of states, primarily in the West, with an eye toward 2012.  Californians, in particular, are likely to get another crack at ending marijuana prohibition in the nation’s most populous state.  Research on voter attitudes and fundraising will determine just how many initiatives will actually make it to the ballot.

Nevertheless, expect to see marijuana reform efforts bubbling up across the country every two years for some time to come. Prop. 19 has created unprecedented momentum as we enter this new decade.