Record-High 50% of Americans Favor Legalizing Marijuana Use - Frank Newport

http://www.gallup.com/poll/150149/Record-High-Americans-Favor-Legalizing-Marijuana.aspx

Support for legalizing marijuana is directly and inversely proportional to age, ranging from 62% approval among those 18 to 29 down to 31% among those 65 and older. Liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to favor legalizing marijuana. And Democrats and independents are more likely to be in favor than are Republicans.
More men than women support legalizing the drug. Those in the West and Midwest are more likely to favor it than those in the South.

It's almost as if the legalization question were another question. The descending order of demographics neatly mirrors just about any social question you can think of; those socially liberal at the top, those socially conservative at the bottom. At some point, like gay marriage, the issue will have a breakthrough, and all it needed was for it's image to go from some stoners who just wanted to be left alone in a basement to a cancer patient suffering from the side effects to make it acceptable to want to legalize it. In fact, gay marriage might be the best analogy you could think of.