Article from Reason by Steve Chapman.

The war on drugs has been going on since 1971, and we have a winner: marijuana. Back then, possession of pot carried heavy penalties in many states—even life imprisonment. Today, 29 states sanction medical use of cannabis, and eight allow recreational use. Legal weed has become about as controversial as Powerball.

One sign of the shift came in Wednesday’s debate among the Democrats running for governor of Illinois. The state didn’t get its first medical marijuana dispensary until 2015, and it decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot only last year. But most of the candidates endorsed legalization of recreational weed, and one supported “full decriminalization.”

Those positions are not politically risky, in Illinois or in most places. They’re mainstream.

In 2016, Gallup Poll found that 60 percent of Americans supported full legalization—up from 36 percent in 2005. Given the choice, voters generally favor it. Nine states had cannabis initiatives on the ballot last year. Medical marijuana won in four states, and recreational pot won in another four. Only Arizona’s recreational pot measure failed.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Chmee2 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons