White House Promotes New Survey Showing Majority Of Americans Agree With Biden's Cannabis Pardon

Fully 67% of Americans support President Biden’s recent move to pardon all prior federal convictions for cannabis possessions and their governors to do the same at a state level, a new USA Today/Ipsos poll revealed. Biden announced the move on Oct. 6 and the poll was conducted immediately after between Oct. 7-9 by questioning a representative probability sample of 1,028 adults over 18 from the general population.

There was even higher support for removing cannabis from the list of Schedule 1 substances.

Survey Key Takeaways

• As many as 62% of adults questioned in the poll said they thought marijuana decriminalization is important to rectify past racial justices, rather than something that would result in more crime, drug trafficking and consumption among minors. Some 33%, did not agree.
• Most support for cannabis decriminalization came from those under 50.
• Overall 72% of Americans support changing how the law classifies marijuana. When it comes to political affiliation, 84% of Democrats are backing this, compared to 74% of Independents and 58% of Republicans.
• Some 67% said their governors should pardon all state-level convictions for marijuana possession. Broken down by political party, 83% of Democrats are in favor, compared to 71% of independents, and 44% of Republicans.
• The news was seen not only by those who are interested in this policy change, with 72% confirming to have at least heard the announcement, in the days immediately following.

The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample of adults.

The poll was undertaken on the heels of another that was conducted from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2022, that ask a representative sample of 2,005 registered voters if they would like to see cannabis legalized on the federal level. The results were as expected and in line with other surveys conducted over the last several years.

A Morning Consult/Politico survey revealed that a majority of U.S. voters support federal marijuana legalization with three in five voters (or 60%) being in favor of legal recreational weed versus 27% against it. The remaining 13% were undecided.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain shared the survey results on Twitter, demonstrating the administration's focus on public response to Biden's marijuana actions, Marijuana Moment reported.

Strong support for the @POTUS executive actions on marijuana:https://t.co/ZuVrBJZTKb

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) October 11, 2022

Photo: Benzinga Edit; Sources: Shutterstock