New Poll: More Than 33 Million Americans Currently Smoke Marijuana

New Poll: 33 Million Americans Currently Smoke Weed

Long Story Short

Results from a new Gallup poll about cannabis use in the U.S. were published today. And those results point to some pretty serious marijuana use. According to the numbers generated by the survey, there are at least 33 million Americans who smoke marijuana.

The Details

Here are some of the key points from the new survey:

• 13% of all adults say they smoke cannabis.
• 43% of all adults in the U.S. stated that they’d tried marijuana at some point in their lives.
• Age and religious beliefs played significant parts in whether or not a person uses marijuana.
• 19% of adults under the age of 30 say they use cannabis. That’s more than double the number of marijuana users in older age groups.
• Only 2% of weekly churchgoers use marijuana. Among people who only go once in a while, that number rises to 7%. And 14% of people who hardly ever go to church smoke cannabis.
• The percentage of adults who say they use marijuana has almost doubled over the last three years.

Crunching The Numbers

The survey found that 13% of all adults in the U.S. smoke marijuana. That’s roughly 1 out of every 8 adults. And if you crunch the numbers even further, the final result is that there are at least 33 million Americans who use cannabis.

Gallup

These figures also point to a significant increase in the number of adults who smoke marijuana. When Gallup conducted a similar survey in 2013, only 7% of adults said they smoked cannabis. But this year, only three years later, that number nearly doubled.

What These Numbers Mean

There are a few possible reasons for this enormous jump in the number of cannabis smoking adults. One could be that there are more states now than ever before that have legalized marijuana.

Right now there are 25 states, plus Washington D.C., that have legalized some form of medical marijuana. And a handful go even further. Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and D.C. have all legalized recreational cannabis. This fall, five more states will vote on new legalization bills.

There also seems to be wider cultural acceptance and support of cannabis. A survey that was published in June found that 54% of all Americans support legalizing recreational marijuana, and 89% are for medical cannabis.

Despite all this, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. And some reports indicate that law enforcement is actually making record high numbers of arrests for marijuana possession. Similarly, there have been more federal raids of legal dispensaries in recent years than ever before.