Election Day may prove a beginning of the final victory for Legal Marijuana

The polls before Election Day suggest that the movement to legalize marijuana is going to witness a huge success. If voters in California and four other states support the recreational use of country’s most popular illicit drug that will trigger a new wave of public support in many other states.

The legalization movement can sweep entire west coast and a block of states reaching from the Pacific to Colorado, raising a stronger challenge to the federal government’s ban on the drug.

The approval of recreational marijuana laws in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington may have set the stage for eventual federal legalization. But a win in California, which is world’s sixth largest economy, would make decriminalization of the drug inevitable at federal level, expert says.

“If we’re successful, it’s the beginning of the end of the war on marijuana,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California and a former mayor of San Francisco. “If California moves, it will put more pressure on Mexico and Latin America writ large to reignite a debate on legalization there.”

Drug Enforcement Administration, defying all calls for softening of regulations on marijuana, classified it as a Schedule 1 drug, in August this year. The legalization puts marijuana-legal states in direct conflict with federal government.

In economic terms, the marijuana market will grow to a size where federal government will increasingly come under  pressure to ignore calls for legalization. The market for both medicinal and recreational marijuana is projected to grow from $ 7 billion to $22 billion in next four years, if California joins marijuana-legal states, according to experts.

“This is the vote heard round the world,” said Arcview’s chief executive, Troy Dayton. “What we’ve seen before has been tiny compared to what we are going to see in California.”