“CPEAR’s poll is a thinly veiled attempt to persuade policymakers to take a broadly popular issue in a less popular direction.”
By Damian Fagon, Parabola Center
In 1994, R.J. Reynolds quietly pumped millions into a flag-waving coalition called “Get Government Off Our Back.” The mission was simple: pose as a grassroots movement with an anti-regulation agenda to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from touching cigarettes. Three decades later, a similar playbook has found its way to cannabis, and the fingerprints are unmistakable.
Today’s vehicle is the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education and Regulation (CPEAR), bankrolled in part by Altria, the Marlboro parent that sank $1.8 billion into the cannabis firm Cronos Group. Earlier this month, CPEAR released a poll trumpeting a popular “mandate” for the STATES 2.0 Act, a bill that would take a “states’ rights” approach to marijuana. Set aside the patriotic headlines and the math tells another story. This poll functions not to record public opinion, but to manufacture it.
The Messenger Is The Message
CPEAR is not a neutral think tank. It is a front group financed by Altria and other tobacco and alcohol giants.
The polling firm, Forbes Tate Partners, also happens to be a public affairs firm and a registered lobbyist for Altria. Sponsor and pollster are, quite literally, on the same team.
Accepting the findings at face value asks us to forget that the data and the desired outcome share the same business address.
A Framework For Consolidation
The cynical design of CPEAR’s favored bill, STATES 2.0, lies in what it doesn’t do: expunge criminal records, protect cannabis workers’ rights, prevent marijuana-related deportations or take any accountability for the harms caused by the war on drugs. Instead, 50 states will compete for investment on the most lenient, “business-friendly” terms they can devise.
The deepest-pocketed operators and conglomerates will flock to low-tax, low-oversight jurisdictions, monopolize supply chains and absorb smaller competitors. We have seen this playbook before in alcohol and tobacco, and the economic logic with cannabis will be no different.
Every law we pass shapes the economy Americans will inherit. Adopting the STATES 2.0 Act would codify consolidation and leave mom-and-pop operators scrambling for scraps.
Congress can choose a better course by insisting on a legalization framework that clears records, protects state regulation and channels investment to the very communities that paid the highest price under prohibition. Anything less turns legalization into prohibition by another name.
Persuasion By Design
CPEAR’s poll is a thinly veiled attempt to persuade policymakers to take a broadly popular issue in a less popular direction. It frames STATES 2.0 in the language of states’ rights, a tested appeal to conservative voters, while staying silent on relevant questions related to record expungement, equity and small business access.
By excluding legislative alternatives such as the MORE Act, which pairs legalization with the justice reforms that a majority of Americans do support, the poll reduces a complex debate to a loaded yes-or-no test.
And by asking how a person would feel about a congressional candidate or the Trump administration if they supported marijuana reform, the final question seeks to make CPEAR’s chosen bill look like a winning political decision. And yet, it isn’t.
What The Numbers Really Say
The poll’s own data reveal a critical weakness. Despite general support for federal legalization standing steady at 70 percent, respondent enthusiasm drops to the low 60s when presented within the STATES 2.0 framework.
Wouldn’t we expect a federal marijuana bill to garner at least as much support as marijuana legalization generally? But even in a poll framed by the bill’s own advocates, STATES 2.0 is less popular than the cause it claims to represent.
And the news for their favored politicians is even worse—despite CPEAR’s creative description of a “near majority” being more likely to support a pro-cannabis candidate, the big takeaway is that the actual majority would not be more likely to support a pro-cannabis candidate. With tobacco and alcohol conglomerates leading the lobbying charge, can we blame them?
We don’t know what else the numbers showed.
The report relies on a low-transparency online poll of 2,051 respondents and omits key disclosures that make it impossible to verify or replicate. Without information on respondent demographics, such as age, gender identity, race and income or a nuanced look at their political philosophy instead of just party labels, one could easily “cook the books” by oversampling favorable groups and pretending it happened organically.
By withholding these data, along with the weighting methods that the American Association for Public Opinion Research considers basic requirements, the pollsters tell Congress and the voting public to simply trust them. Given their blatant conflict of interest, why should anyone?
Damian Fagon is a former New York cannabis regulator and the executive leadership fellow at Parabola Center for Law and Policy.
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