I have occasionally said here that support for the legalization of hard drugs is so low that it's never even been polled.
I was wrong.
I just found out that it was polled by the Huffington Post last year.
Also polled, by a different organization, was the belief that Earth has been visited by flying saucers.
Although a small majority now believes that pot should be legalized, flying saucers beat hard drugs by a fat margin.
The results for drugs are:
Cocaine -- 11% for legalization, 83% against.
Ecstasy -- 9% for, 79% against.
Crack -- 9% for, 85% against.
Heroin -- 9% for, 86% against.
Meth -- 8% for, 79% against.
LSD -- 8% for, 83% against.
These results are more vividly displayed in the Huffington Post article here. Take a look.
Meanwhile, the public is relatively quite convinced that flying saucers have visited the earth. As a Fox News survey found in June 2012:
A new survey finds that 80 million Americans, or 36 percent of the population, believe UFOs are real. One in 10 respondents say they have personally witnessed an alien spaceship.
I thought the kicker was classic, however:
Anyway, moving right along, four times as many people believe in little green men as believe we should legalize hard drugs.And if aliens were to invade the country sometime in the next four years, 65 percent of survey respondents said President Obama would be better suited for handling the invasion than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Since we often discuss the meaning of words and terms in this space, I cannot help but note here that the term UFO technically stands for Unidentified Flying Object. Many folks (wrongly, in my view) use the term UFO as a stand-in for a more accurate term like alien spacecraft. Wisely, Bill, the title of this post does not misuse UFO, though it is unclear if the poll you reference did.
And, in case you care, I have never found the term "Flying Saucer" especially accurate either (e.g., it seems very unlikely that a saucer shape is ideal for interplanetary commuting).
Is there any subject where Mr. Berman and Mr. Otis will not disagree? Will this devolve into another comment war that drags on in seemingly endless points and counter-points on the nuanced meanings of words such as "unidentified," "flying," "saucer" or "alien"?
Seriously, we're talking UFOs here. Give it a rest.
The odd thing is, I don't think Doug even disagrees with me about flying saucers.
And point taken about the point/counter-point debates. Doug is a leading backer of sentencing "reform," so I am happy to discuss the question with him, but of late I agree it's getting a bit out of hand.
I may address this on the blog presently.
Thanks for your note.