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The legalization of cannabis 1 in the United States remains a polarizing topic. In recent years, cannabis legalization initiatives have been passed in a handful of states and many other states have implemented medical marijuana programs. Presently, ten states have fully legalized recreational use of cannabis and twenty-one states have approved ballot initiatives that legalize the use of cannabis for medical reasons. Although support for legalization reached majority approval nationally in 2013, the flowering plant remains illegal under federal law and in the majority of U.S. states (McCarthy 2018). Moreover, as of this writing, neither major political party platform currently advocates for the legalization of cannabis at the federal level.
In the popular culture, drug use, including cannabis, has been historically associated with undesirable facets of society and moral panics surrounding countercultures that threaten the socially normative hierarchy of White America (Schlussel 2017). For example, cannabis prohibition in the 1930s was not based on scientific evidence of its adverse effects, but was instead based in racialized hysteria and paranoia surrounding the effects that cannabis had on users (Booth 2005). The association of cannabis with socially deviant subcultures progressed over the decades from an association of cannabis with Black and Hispanic jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s, to the hippie movement of the 1960s, to “gangsta” rappers of the 1990s. Given the racialized rhetoric surrounding cannabis prohibition throughout American history, it follows that individuals who harbor more racial animus may indeed be more skeptical of marijuana legalization. However, to our knowledge, no empirical research has investigated this association. This research seeks to address this gap in knowledge about the correlates of marijuana attitudes by asking: Do Whites’ racial attitudes inform their opinions on marijuana legalization?
Additionally, it has been well documented that the manifestations of racial prejudice have shifted over the past several decades as subtler forms of prejudice have supplanted overt, blatant forms of old-fashioned racial prejudice (Bobo et al., 1997; Bobo 2011). These newer forms of prejudice, while perhaps not as pernicious as old-fashioned prejudice, have nevertheless been shown to be relatively strong predictors of political attitudes among White Americans (Krysan 2000). Thus, it is important to assess whether different types of racial prejudice may have differential effects on attitudes towards marijuana legalization....