Advocates of marijuana legalization won another victory last month when Governor Dan McKee signed new legislation legalizing recreational marijuana in Rhode Island. New Hampshire—where cannabis is “only” decriminalized and legal for medical purposes—is now the only state in New England where recreational marijuana is not legal.
With Rhode Island now added to the legalization bloc, this means more than 144 million Americans now live in states where recreational cannabis has been legalized. That’s 43 percent of the US population.
Proportion of US Population by Cannabis Legalization Status
Rhode Island is also one of a growing number of states where recreational cannabis has been legalized through the legislative process rather than through statewide referenda or voter initiatives. Initially, recreational legalization was only politically possible through voter initiatives, as legislators refused to approve legalization themselves. The first successful cases of this were in Colorado and Washington State in 2012, and they were followed by Alaska and Oregon in 2014. Since then, recreational cannabis has been legalized through a variety of methods in fifteen other states for a total of nineteen.
Were these states to combine to form their own country, it would be—in terms of population—the tenth-largest country in the world, and only slightly smaller than Russia.
As with gun policy, school vouchers, and apparently abortion policy, cannabis policy is increasingly dominated by state-level legislation. With cannabis, this comes in spite of the fact that federal policy has not actually been changed. Marijuana is still formally targeted by federal bureaucrats as an illegal substance. This continues to hamper commerce in the states in many ways. For example, it remains illegal for federally regulated financial institutions to deal directly with cannabis-related businesses.
