It wasn’t too long ago that commemorating 4/20, marijuana culture’s unofficial high holiday, meant breaking the law. As recently as 14 years ago, smoking weed for fun was forbidden everywhere in the U.S. and only a third of states allowed marijuana use for medical purposes.
Plenty of people still used marijuana, of course, but they had to do so in secret. The prevailing legend for how 4/20 got its name even centers around the story of a group of high schoolers in the 1970s and the time they decided to meet up for a clandestine pot harvest in the woods.
All that started to change in the 1990s. California became the first state to permit medical marijuana use in 1996. Before long, more than a dozen states had followed suit. The true transformation of pot laws began in 2012, when voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot measures making recreational marijuana legal in their states. Since then, marijuana legalization has spread rapidly throughout the U.S., with even some deep-red parts of the country clearing the way for legal pot use.
Marijuana is still illegal under federal law, but today more than half of Americans live in states where recreational use is legal and three-quarters live in places that allow medical marijuana.
So much has happened surrounding weed’s legal, economic and cultural place in the U.S., in such a short period of time, that it can be hard to track just how dramatic America’s pot evolution has been. Here are charts that might help put it all into perspective.
Changing laws, changing minds
Recreational marijuana is now legal in 24 states plus Washington D.C. and 39 states permit medical usage.
Unsurprisingly, the spread of legalization has led to an increase in the number of people who use marijuana. The share of Americans who say they smoke weed more than doubled between 2013 and 2024, according to a poll by Gallup. Even though their ranks are growing, regular pot smokers are still very much the minority in the U.S. — representing just 15% of Americans. In fact, legalization hasn’t led to the explosion in pot use that some might have assumed was inevitable. It’s more accurate to describe the result as a healthy bump, tempered at least in part by the fact that a lot of people were already smoking when it was still illegal.
The share of people who say they have ever tried marijuana is up compared to where it was 10 years ago for almost every age group, according to polls by YouGov. But those increases are modest, and there’s even been a slight dip among younger Americans.
Where there has been truly dramatic change is in how we think about marijuana’s benefits and risks. In 1995, just 25% of Americans believed that pot should be legal — a figure that had remained essentially unchanged for decades. Public opinion started to shift in the late 1990s and has been steadily moving in favor of legalization. Today, about 70% of Americans side in favor of legalization. Concerns about the dangers of marijuana, while still prevalent, have calmed as well. A strong majority of Americans now believe that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.
There are some limits to pot’s public support though. Recreational marijuana has been on state ballots 10 times since 2022. Only three of those measures have passed.
Booming business
Legalization allowed marijuana sales to move out of the shadows and created room for a massive new industry to take root. There are now almost 15,000 marijuana dispensaries throughout the U.S. and almost 80% of Americans live in a county with at least one, according to Pew Research Center.
The size of the legal weed market has more than tripled over the past 8 years. The combined revenue from medical and recreational sales topped $43 billion in 2024, and industry experts expect that figure to rise. That’s not solely because a lot of people want to get high: A substantial portion of the marijuana market is fueled by CBD-based products that millions of people use for their perceived benefits in treating a range of conditions, including anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain and inflammation.
All of these new businesses need workers, of course. The legal marijuana industry employed an estimated 440,000 people in 2024, more than three times as many as in 2017.
Marijuana has also become a sizable source of tax revenue. Every state that has legalized pot has imposed additional taxes on retail sales, though the rates vary significantly — from just 6% in Missouri to a whopping 37% in Washington. While many critics argue that these taxes are far too high, to the point that they stifle the legitimate marijuana market, they have allowed states to bring in billions of dollars in additional funds.
Fewer arrests, but the black market still thrives
A frequently used argument among proponents of legalization is that the presence of a legit marijuana market suddenly makes the illicit weed trade obsolete. But that’s not what has happened. In fact, the marijuana black market is still so big that experts say it poses a serious threat to the future of the legal weed industry.
Still, there has been a substantial reduction in the number of people who are getting busted for low-level marijuana offenses. More than half of all states plus 100 local governments have decriminalized marijuana possession, meaning even when someone is caught breaking the law they do not face the risk of arrest or criminal penalties. More generally, authorities in many places just don’t consider minor pot offenses to be as big of a deal as they did in earlier eras.
The annual number of arrests for marijuana possession has plummeted over the past decade or so, from a record high of more than 600,000 in 2013 to just over 200,000 in 2023.
Reform-minded political leaders have also taken steps to address the legacy of past criminalization, which left millions of people facing penalties for doing things that are now legal. An estimated 2.5 million people have either had either been pardoned or had past marijuana offenses expunged from their records in recent years, according to a tally by the pro-legalization group NORML.
There has been extraordinary momentum behind marijuana legalization over the past two decades, but it remains to be seen how far the movement can go from here. Bringing recreational use to additional states will mean convincing some of the country’s most conservative voters to back the idea. Prospects for nationwide legalization seem far-fetched given the current makeup of Congress.
Americans have radically reconsidered their views on weed in the past two decades. That shift has changed laws, launched a booming industry and fueled criminal justice reform. Read More
