More than half of all Colorado residents have tried marijuana at some point in their lives, according to a collection of data released by Quinnipiac University pollsters.



An employee pulls marijuana out of a large canister for a customer at the LoDo Wellness Center in downtown Denver, Colorado, U.S., on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2014. Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg

Quinnipiac, which is based in Connecticut, conducts scads of state-by-state polling and, on Friday morning, tweeted out a chart comparing pot usage across seven states in which they had conducted polls in February and March. Here are the results.



Image courtesy of Quinnipiac University

The Colorado number shouldn't surprise anyone -- given that pot use is legal in the state, as of January 1. And, the numbers in most of the other states Pew tested -- with the exceptions of Iowa and Virginia where pot usage is under 40 percent -- are consistent with national data about how many people have tried marijuana during their lives.

In a March Pew survey, 48 percent said they had tried marijuana -- although only 12 percent said it had been within the last year. (Among people under 30, 27 percent have used pot in the last year -- triple the number among any other age group.) Of those who said they had used pot in the last year, roughly half (47 percent) said they had done so "just for fun" while three in ten said they had used it for medical purposes.

That same Pew poll showed, for the first time in more than four decades of surveys, that a majority of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana.



