Percent Margin

Gallup released its yearly marijuana poll results on Monday, Oct. 17th, 2011 and the percentage of Americans who now believe the drug should be legal has climbed again. Fully 50 percent of U.S. citizens, the poll results say, favor legalizing marijuana, while 46 percent of those surveyed said marijuana should remain illegal.

The poll asked 'Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal, or not?" and the polling company based their results on telephone interviews of 1,005 American adults 18 and over. The poll, conducted from Oct. 6-9, is the first in the history of the U.S. Gallup polls on marijuana to find 50 percent of Americans favor legalizing the drug. Last year the figure was at 46 percent favoring legalization, at that time a new high.

On its website, Gallup writes that with "results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points." Respondents were contacted on both cell phones and land lines and every American state had citizens sampled. The poll collected other Data, such as age, sex and political affiliations.