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Emile comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong
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I wouldn't say they can't say so - just that they (correctly) estimate that if they came out in favor of legalisation, there are more people who would stop voting for them (not only people who are against legalization, but also those who would subconsciously tag a politician like that as a "weirdo" or "pothead"), then there are people who would start voting for them.
So it's up to us non-politicians to do the job of repeatedly and loudly pointing out that marijuana doesn't deserve harsher treatment than alcohol and tobacco - not because we're morally superior to politicians, but because we aren't subject to the same constraints.
By "can't say so", I mean "can't say so and retain any power", which to a politician's ears is pretty much the same thing.
It's another example of anti-silly bias. Cannabis legalisation has roughly the same support as banning abortion, but anti-abortionists are treated as proper participants in a live debate, but people who oppose drug prohibition are still treated as silly stoners. No-one seriously tries to answer the arguments against these laws; they just fulminate about "irresponsibility" and "our children" and play the silly card.
If the very slow shift of demographics hits a tipping point on this issue, we could see some fairly rapid change.
Yes. Sometime in the 1990s.
Whoops! Didn't happen!
Support for legalizing marijuana is negatively correlated with age. I could not find statistics by age, but I would imagine that older Americans, being generally more conservative, are more likely to oppose abortion. Voter turnout increases with age, so although legalizing marijuana and banning abortion have similar overall levels of support, banning abortion has higher support among people whose opinions politicians care about (voters).
Does it really decline with age, or did older people form their values in a different culture? It's possible people's values are stable over time but people born a long time ago were more likely to form different values from the ones formed by people born more recently. Has anyone tried to distinguish between these possibilities?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/aw6/global_warming_is_a_better_test_of_irrationality/61ff
Pardon my sloppy phrasing. I did not intend to imply causality one way or another, merely the correlation. I edited the original comment to reflect my intent.
Robert Altemeyer reports a correlation between a likely-related attitude (support for 'traditional' authority) and -- not age, but having children. Continued education has a stronger apparent effect in the opposite direction. But I don't think he directly addresses this question.