Only about a third of Americans think marijuana is dangerous, and less than half still believe the “gateway theory” that using cannabis makes people significantly more likely to try more dangerous drugs, according to a new poll.

The survey, released by Rasmussen Reports on Tuesday, asked U.S. adults how dangerous they think cannabis is.

Just over one out of three indicated they think marijuana is either somewhat (24 percent) or very dangerous (13 percent).

In contrast, a majority of respondents said cannabis is either not dangerous at all (27 percent) or not very dangerous (28 percent).

When asked how likely they believe it is that “marijuana use leads to the use of more dangerous drugs,” just 18 percent said it is very likely and 27 percent believe it is somewhat likely. Nineteen percent said it is not at all likely and 27 percent think it is not very likely, while 9 percent said they aren’t sure.

When broken down by party, Republicans are more likely to believe that marijuana is either somewhat or very dangerous (50 percent) than Democrats are (33 percent).

GOP voters are also more likely to buy the gateway theory about marijuana being very or somewhat likely to be true (60 percent) than Democrats are (42 percent).

The poll involved interviews with 1,234 American adults between September 8-10 and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

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The results comport with other recent surveys showing that American attitudes and behaviors around cannabis are shifting.

A Gallup poll released last month, for example, found that a record-high number of U.S. adults now smoke marijuana, while cigarette smoking is at an all-time low.

Similarly, an analysis of federal National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data published last year showed that more Americans now use marijuana than smoke cigarettes amid shifting perceptions of harm of the two substances.

A study released last month found that people who consume cannabis-infused THC beverages end up drinking less alcohol.

Last year, a separate Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans remain in favor of legalizing marijuana but that support saw a slight dip from 2024—a trend that’s been “driven by Republicans” who are turning against the reform.

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Legalizing marijuana for adult use is linked to gradual reductions in violent crime—while medical cannabis legalization is associated with lower rates of property crime—according to a new study.

As more states move to enact legalization, researchers at Jack Welch College of Business and Technology, Barnard College, National Chengchi University and Longwood University set out to investigate the relationship between different versions of the reform and crime trends.

The study, published in the journal Economic Modelling, identified a unique divide when looking at the impact of legalizing cannabis for recreational as compared to medical purposes, with analytic models revealing how different forms of regulated access seem to be associated with different patterns in criminal activity.

“Novel policies may generate unintended spillovers, particularly when legalizing one activity alters incentives for other forms of crime,” the study authors wrote. “Marijuana legalization provides a useful setting to examine such effects, given the staggered adoption of medical and recreational laws across all 50 U.S. states.”

“We find that medical legalization reduces property crime, while recreational legalization reduces violent crime.”

While initial analyses signaled that adult-use legalization might increase property crime, once state-specific time trends where incorporated into the researchers’ models with synthetic specification, “the effect becomes negative and statistically insignificant.”

“Overall, the findings indicate that estimated crime effects are highly sensitive to identification assumptions and do not provide robust evidence of an increase in property crime following legalization, underscoring the importance of careful empirical design in policy evaluation,” the study says.

Notably, the researchers found that the impact of cannabis reform on crime is gradual, with the effects manifesting “powerfully after several years.” For advocates pushing for legalization, the authors said, that means they should exercise caution in how they frame the issue, as crime rate declines don’t appear to happen overnight.

“What emerges from our multi-step analysis is a birds-eye view of legalization: medical and recreational legalization have different impacts and operate through diverse channels, with significant lag effects,” they said. “The overarching result from our main synthetic difference in differences model is that medical legalization reduces property crime, while recreational legalization reduces violent crime.”

“Such effects support the Becker hypothesis that legalization drives out crime. Building up to the synthetic difference in difference model, we discovered that there may also be important lag effects. The diverse and potentially time-varying impacts of medical and recreational legalization raise a cautionary note to policymakers: those considering legalization should wait a few years before pronouncing on the cost–benefit impact, focus on the specific type of legalization, and study closely the outcomes from similar states.”

It’s not immediately clear from the research why medical and recreational marijuana legalization would lead to diverging crime trends, but  the broader impact of the reform on crime has been studied before.

Last year, for example, a study looking at Atlanta’s move to decriminalize marijuana concluded that, contrary to warnings from some critics, the policy change in fact led to a decrease in violent crime as police turned their attention to more urgent matters.

A 2024 analysis of violence between intimate partners separately found that legalizing marijuana for adult use “results in a substantial decrease in rates of intimate partner violence.”

A 2021 study, meanwhile, found that reductions of crime generally after marijuana legalization was being significantly understated because the FBI data is inconsistent and comes from voluntary participation by local agencies.

In 2020, researchers looked at how adult-use marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado affected crime rates in neighboring states, and the resulting study determined that passage of recreational cannabis laws may have actually reduced certain major crimes in nearby jurisdictions.

The previous year, a federally funded study found that legalizing marijuana has little to no impact on rates of violent or property crime. The policy change did seem connected to a long-term decline in burglaries in one state, however.

A 2018 study from the think tank RAND said county-level data from California suggested that there was “no relationship between county laws that legally permit dispensaries and reported violent crime,” the researchers wrote. What’s more, there was a “negative and significant relationship between dispensary allowances and property crime rates,” though it’s possible that’s the product of “pre-existing trends.”

That same year, researchers at Victoria University of Wellington and Harvard University found that medical marijuana laws essentially have a null effect of crime rates, with one big exception: A nearly 20 percent reduction in violent and property crimes in California following the legalization of medical cannabis there.

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In an exclusive High Times interview, the Jackass icon and his wife Dannii Marie talk recovery, sleep, bad trips, psychedelic ceremonies and why their new brand feels less like a launch and more like a life.

“Weed does not lead to other drugs,” says Bam Margera in an exclusive interview with High Times. “It leads to fucking carpentry.”

He says it to make a point about his wife. She builds bongs out of apples. That, he explains, is what cannabis actually does to people.

Two years sober from alcohol, goes to bed at ten, skates; he’s building a cannabis brand called Bam THC with his wife Dannii Marie, and the project feels less like a licensing deal than like something they are actually building around their life.

“Cannabis played a big role in recovery because I had a really horrible sleep schedule,” he says.

Purple Bin Laden Weed

Bam Margera was not, historically, a cannabis person.

His first experience happened at 23, on the Steve O tour in Copenhagen. Someone offered him a hundred dollars to eat a hundred dollars worth of raw flower. He needed the money.

“I swallowed this shit and I just remember laughing my ass off for no reason,” he says. “And then I just stopped in a panic mode.”

He went back to his hotel room, wrote a list of everyone he loved because he thought he was dying, fell asleep on the bathroom sink and woke up 24 hours later, badly bruised. For the following week he survived on vanilla ice cream. Everything had a yellow tint.

He steered clear of cannabis after that. Then, years later, he ended up on Snoop Dogg’s tour bus in Petaluma. It wasn’t his idea to smoke, exactly, but when Snoop has taken eleven puffs off a joint and passes it to you, the social math is simple. Margera counted the puffs, took one and immediately went somewhere he did not want to be.

“Note to self,” he says. “No more Purple Bin Laden weed.”

He missed the whole show. He lay in a bush outside the tour bus and stared at the moon.

Even after that, the conclusion wasn’t simple. Cannabis didn’t agree with him — except when it did. The difference, it turned out, was context. At a nightclub one night, stoned and recognizable, he walked in and immediately felt surrounded.

“Everybody recognized me and I thought like they were like crows attacking me saying the word bam,” he says. “Bam, bam, bam. I’m like, I got to get the fuck out of here.”

A campfire in the woods with chill friends? Fine. A crowded nightclub with everyone in his face? Total shutdown. He knows the difference now. The plant didn’t change. The situation did.

Enter Dannii

Dannii Marie is Bam’s wife. She is also, by her own description, his business partner, stretch coach and personal trainer, and the person who — when they first got together — decided she was going to change his relationship with the plant, whether he liked it or not.

She’d been using cannabis daily since she was 16. Grew up in Charleston with a mother in medicine who normalized it at home. Arrived in adulthood without the stigma that had kept Bam away from it for years. When he came into her life still drinking, she saw the situation clearly.

“I hate alcohol and I hate drugs,” she told him. “Marijuana is not a drug. So if you want to do that, that’s great because I do it all day every day. Anything else is off limits. And you have a boyfriend called vodka, and if it touches your lips, you’re cheating.”

What followed, slowly, with gummies and a ten o’clock bedtime, was a different relationship with the plant. Not recreational. Not rebellious. Functional.

“I would stare at the ceiling till the sun came up with my racing ass thoughts,” he says. “And the weed gummies, or just a puff of weed, would help me completely go to bed.”

Two years sober. Bedtime at ten. Skating again.

The Part He Doesn’t Sanitize

Margera doesn’t trade in gentle euphemism for his past.

He stayed away from drugs and alcohol as a teenager because he had one goal: to become a professional skateboarder. That focus held. Then he made it, the money came, the cars piled up in the driveway. Two Lamborghinis, a Ferrari, a DeLorean, two Bentleys…

“I’ve run out of goals and wishes, man,” he says. “Now I’m just going to get fucked up.”

He did. Daily drinking. Cocaine. Adderall. He ended up in treatment on 18 different medications, half of them sleep-related. They made him sleepwalk. He knocked himself out five or six times in the same treatment center, each time a two-thousand-dollar ambulance ride he did not need.

“Pretty much all in a row,” he says.

Meanwhile, the one thing that had actually helped him sleep was off the table. That is the part that still frustrates Dannii.

“They can’t hit the bong,” she says. “We are so backwards.”

When the courts ordered Margera into rehab, she moved first. She got him a Pennsylvania medical card before he went in, thinking ahead about probation and what would happen if he tested positive. Then, at the facility, she ran into the same wall: the staff wanted to put him back on the same medication cycle that had been sending him into walls. She shut it down. He did 30 days clean of everything except cannabis.

The system, in her telling, had it exactly backwards. Alcohol is legal. The thing that helped him sleep is the thing they were trying to keep away from him.

Why The Body Needed This

Bam’s injuries are not theoretical.

Sixteen staples in his head. Eight broken ribs on one side, four on the other. Three broken feet, fifteen broken right wrists, eight broken left wrists, every finger, every toe. For years, alcohol muffled the pain and made it worse by morning. He’d wake up hurting worse than before, drink again to get through the day and run the whole cycle back.

The Bam THC roll-on broke that loop.

“With the THC and the CBD and the menthol and the lidocaine in these roll-ons,” he says, “it numbs it in such a healthy way that in like seconds you could go skating the day that you woke up and you can barely even limping to the fucking bathroom.”

What They’re Building

Bam THC launched earlier this year with that roll-on as its flagship: a lidocaine-based topical with CBD, THC and menthol, built around the simple premise that some bodies need serious relief and don’t want to smell like a dispensary while getting it. Flower, concentrates, gummies and pre-rolls are on the way. Dannii handles quality assurance on the inhalables and edibles, keeps a notebook rating each product and why, and worked with Bam closely on naming and packaging.

“A lot of other companies wanted to just put his name on something,” she says. “Which I would not allow.”

Manufacturing is handled by the SMAK’D team out of Miami, with over a decade in the industry. The strain names, No Safety Kush, Skull & Smoke and Punk Runtz among them, were designed by Bam and Dannii together.

In the interview, they talk over each other, wander into stories about Tommy Chong at a Comic-Con signing and Snoop wearing Bam’s custom sunglasses on stage that same night in Petaluma. At one point, Bam watches Dannii describe her testing process and says, unprompted: “Your passion for these products are seriously like my passion is skateboarding.”

“It’s fun because it helps both of us,” she says.

Dear Congress

Ask Margera why cannabis is still federally illegal and he goes full Bam.

“If everybody got along and behaved themselves and nobody did anything wrong, there would slowly be no more news. There would be no more helicopter chases, no more jails, no more tickets to give out. We need to have drunk motherfuckers fighting each other and getting arrested.”

She once sent him into a dispensary alone to pick something out. He emerged bewildered.

“Babe, there’s a lot of flavors in there now,” he reported back. “Do you want the kiwi strawberry birthday cake or the grape honeydew melon coconut maple nut crunch weeds?”

She did not want the grape honeydew melon coconut maple nut crunch weeds.

Dannii has the sharper version of the legalization argument. She helped Curaleaf intake patients in Florida when the state couldn’t process medical-card volume fast enough, standing at the front door helping elderly patients check in who had no idea what they were doing. She’s watched large operators move in and degrade the product since. She’s dumped dispensary flower that came out like oregano.

“Your street guy now has better weed than the dispensary,” she says.

The cultural inversion is something she finds genuinely bizarre. The skating world, where Bam built his entire identity, has always been cannabis-forward. The modeling world, where she built hers, still hides it. She’s stood outside venues in beautiful gowns, watching colleagues smoke cigarettes while she quietly does something the industry treats as far more scandalous. Her mother is a cardiologist.

“She’ll puff a Marlboro Red,” Dannii says. “Your heart doctors are smoking cigarettes and cannabis is not legal. I don’t understand it.”

She wants legalization but she also wants the plant left intact. The two things are not the same, and she knows it. Her pitch to Congress lands in one sentence: “Cannabis is a beautiful plant. Please do not destroy it.”

Seven Ceremonies

The recovery story doesn’t stop at gummies and bedtimes.

Margera has done seven ten-hour ceremonial sessions with a close friend, a shaman from Iran named Naveed. They start at five in the morning and end at five at night. The process involves a brew he describes as shiahuasca, a paste called harmala, “five burns on the skin filled with a frog oil called kambo” that makes his face swell and purges him completely, three mushrooms and rapé, “a tobacco blown up the nose to clear the sinuses.”

“If he wasn’t there to guide me, I’d probably lose my mind,” he says. “But he’s always right there, just eye contact. He doesn’t even have to speak.”

What comes up in the ceremonies, he says, is everything. Every decision, every regret, every road not taken, running on a loop until something settles. He describes the end of each session with unusual clarity: “Yes, I figured it out. That’s great.”

He says he’d only do it in a controlled ceremonial context. Not recreationally. Not casually. The structure matters.

“This one can’t be just tripping some mushrooms,” he says.

His shaman, he adds, has worked with heroin addicts, alcoholics, people with serious illness. He believes in it the same way he now believes in the gummy at ten o’clock and the roll-on before the skate park: not as magic, but as tools that work when approached with intention.

What The Brand Is, Really

Two people finishing each other’s sentences, genuinely excited, clearly building something that means something to them.

Margera speaks about addiction and self-destruction with the bluntness of someone who can no longer afford to romanticize it. He doesn’t sound polished. He doesn’t sound cured. He sounds like someone who knows exactly how bad things got, which is maybe why he takes the ten o’clock bedtime seriously now.

“He’s not going to go backwards just because we have a cannabis product,” Dannii says. “It’s actually helped him a lot.”

Bam put it differently.

Weed doesn’t lead to other drugs. His wife proved it with an apple.

Photos courtesy of Bam THC.

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