According to Gallup polling, Americans who support legalizing marijuana has jumped from 12% in 1969 to 64% in 2025. People who admit to having used marijuana has also moved from just 4% in 1969 to 47% in 2024. You rarely get two in three Americans to agree on anything, but they do in fact agree that marijuana should be legal, Enten said.
Yet it now seems that the biggest change to US federal drug policy for more than 50 years will happen through a Republican president. On Monday, Donald Trump confirmed the rumours that he is very strongly considering rescheduling cannabis (or marijuana, as it is still called in US state documents, due to an early-20th-century drive to emphasise the plant's foreignness) from Schedule I in the Controlled Substances Act where its currently sits alongside heroin to Schedule III, next to drugs such as codeine.