Poll: Texans coming around to pot, gay marriage and still deeply in love with football

 Tim Timmons holds a glass pipe filled with marijuana prior to smoking it at his Garland home October 26, 2010. Timmons, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, offered to go before the Texas legislature to show lawmakers what a toke looks like and explain the benefits to convince them that medical marijuana should be legalized. (COURTNEY PERRY/Staff Photographer)

By BRANDI GRISSOM
and BRITTNEY MARTIN
 

(Editor’s note: This story has been updated throughout.)

Texans are chilling out about pot legalization, the results of a poll released Wednesday indicate.

A poll released Wednesday by the Texas Lyceum found that 46 percent of Texans support marijuana legalization, a 13 percentage-point jump from 2011. The increased support for relaxing weed laws comes after 23 other states have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational uses.

The Texas Lyceum is a nonprofit, nonpartisan leadership organization, and this poll was the organization’s eighth annual survey. The telephone survey contacted 1,000 adult Texans from Sept. 8-21. The poll’s margin of error is 3.1 percentage points. The pollsters asked people their views on a range of topics from border security and immigration to gay marriage and football.

“We continue to be disabused of the notion that Texans are all one thing or the other,” said Darren Shaw, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who worked on the poll. “There certainly is a conservative reservoir of opinion, but that plays out in complex ways depending upon the particular issue.”

Marijuana legalization, though, was an area in which Texans’ opinions shifted the most.
Of the 50 percent of respondents who opposed legalization, 57 percent said they would support reducing penalties for possession of small amounts.

Republicans and Democrats alike said they supported reducing penalties for possession.

During the legislative session this year, a measure that would have reduced the penalty for possessing less than one ounce of marijuana from jail time to a fine failed to gain traction.

Lawmakers rejected a measure to study the effect of marijuana as a treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

A bill to eliminate criminal penalties for marijuana use also failed, along with one that would have legalized marijuana for medical use.

Still, marijuana proponents made more progress in 2015 than ever before.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that allows patients with intractable epilepsy to treat the disease with cannabis oil that is low in THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana

“Texas is ready for marijuana policy reform – it can improve public safety, boost our economy, and provide much-needed health care options for struggling Texans,” said Ed Espinoza, executive director of the left-leaning group Progress Texas.

On other policy issues, Texans, as they have in recent years, continue to view immigration and border security as the most important challenges facing the states, the poll showed. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed said immigration was the top issue.

Overall, 62% supported increased border security spending by the Legislature, with Republicans overwhelmingly supporting it. This year, lawmakers dedicated $800 million to border security operations over the next two years.

Noting that immigration has been the dominant topic of discussion by real-estate mogul and TV personality Donald Trump, the GOP’s front-running presidential candidate, Shaw said that those issues are indicative of how people view the performance of government officials.

When it comes to gay marriage, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex unions, 49 percent of Texans said they favor gay marriage, up from 33 percent in 2011.

The poll, Shaw said, shows that Texas is not a monolith of knee-jerk conservatism.

“The state has a very diverse population,” he said.

But Texans are pretty much of one mind when it comes to football. They still love it.

Nationally, there has been increasing concern about the potential long-term impact of repeated head injuries on children who play tackle football. A national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last year showed that 40 percent of Americans would steer their kids away from the sport. The Texans polled by the Lyceum were not dissuaded from their dedication to the Friday night lights. Seventy-two percent said they would encourage their children to play, while only 21 percent would discourage them.
    

 

College Station High School football players warm up before a high school football game against Willis, Friday, Sept. 25, 2015, at Cougar Stadium in College Station, Texas. (Sam Craft/College Station Eagle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Resource : http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2015/09/poll-texans-coming-around-to-pot-gay-marriage-and-still-deeply-in-love-with-football.html/