More Americans now favor legal cannabis than legal tobacco, surveys show, signaling a sharp societal shift from an era when cigarette-smoking was legal pretty much everywhere and pot-smoking was legal absolutely nowhere.
Fifty-seven percent of American adults would support “a policy prohibiting the sale of all tobacco products,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in a research brief last month.
A slightly larger majority, 59 percent, believe marijuana should be legal for both medical and recreational use, according to a Pew Research surveyconducted in October. Another 30 percent approve of cannabis for medical use alone. Only 10 percent of the American public believes marijuana should not be legal at all.
The findings reflect growing public consensus that cannabis is safer than tobacco, which the CDC considers the leading cause of preventable death. Studies have found marijuana less addictive than cigarettes and marijuana smoke less harmful to the lungs, although doctors caution that cannabis still poses many potential health hazards.
Public health experts don’t expect a national tobacco ban anytime soon. Instead, they hope rising anti-tobacco sentiment will drive federal regulation that makes cigarettes less addictive and less palatable to the young.
“I don’t know of anyone in my peer group that’s in favor of banning tobacco,” said Adam Goldstein, a professor and director of tobacco intervention programs at the University of North Carolina medical school. “We went down that road with alcohol,” he said, alluding to the nation’s failed 1920s experiment with Prohibition.
Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in public opinion toward marijuana, whose legalization as a product for recreational sale began with the passage of state measures in Washington and Colorado in 2012.
Society’s retreat from tobacco has proceeded more slowly. In the Eisenhower 1950s, much of the nation embraced cigarettes as benign, nonaddictive and socially acceptable. Two-fifths of Americans smoked in 1966, when the first cautionary notes appeared on cigarette packs.
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