If public opinion polls mean anything, the rest of the country could soon be following Washington State and Colorado in legalizing medicinal and recreational marijuana.

A recent CBS poll says 51 percent of Americans support full legalization of marijuana. A similar Gallup poll from October 2013 puts that figure at 58 percent, which marked the first time a clear majority of Americans are in favor to legalize recreational weed.

“This is something we need to address sooner rather than later, and it’s not going away anytime soon,” Scott E. Yasko, a national account executive with Prium, a Georgia-based medical intervention company, said during a panel discussion at the National Rx Drug Abuse Summit.

This specter of legally available marijuana presents concerns for drug addiction counselors, public health officials, and policy leaders who are already embattled in the effort to stem prescription opiate drug abuse.

Fall River pharmacist Tom Pasternak, the owner of Walsh Pharmacy, attended the marijuana panel, and said marijuana might have some medicinal benefit, but he asked, “At what expense?”

“In the long run, it will make our society worse,” Pasternak said. “We don’t need more people under the influence of chemicals.”

Marijuana was used for pain management until the turn of the 20th century, when other medicines such as aspirin entered the market. By 1920, the League of Nations began moving to restrict marijuana. By 1937, the first legislation to criminalize marijuana was enacted in the United States.

There are several success stories of patients smoking marijuana to manage pain, but the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, which by definition, means that the government still sees it having no legitimate medicinal purpose and a high chance of addiction.

Despite the Colorado and Washington State laws, the federal Controlled Substances Act, passed by Congress in 1970, still classifies marijuana as an illegal narcotic, and so it is technically still a crime to possess and sell weed even in states that allow for medicinal or recreational pot.

An August 2013 memo from the U.S. Department of Justice calls for a sort of hands-off approach to enforcing marijuana laws in states that allow for medicinal and recreational purposes.

Twenty-one jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana. Twelve states are considering measures to allow medicinal marijuana while nine states are looking at ballot measures and legislation to legalize recreational pot. A 2012 ballot measure legalized medicinal marijuana in Massachusetts and authorized the state Department of Public Health to craft regulations on the dispensaries that will cultivate and sell medicinal marijuana. Pro-cannabis advocates are already eyeing a ballot measure to legalize full recreational marijuana in Massachusetts.

Rachel Brozina, an Arizona-based attorney, said the legalization efforts will have “some interesting implications” as far as employment law is concerned. For example, will companies be able to fire someone for smoking weed if it’s legal where they live? Also, lawmakers and police will be challenged to respond to people who smoke marijuana and operate a vehicle, given that some people metabolize marijuana differently than others.

“There will be a lot of litigation in this area of criminal law,” Brozina said.

Meanwhile, statistics show that more children are being exposed to marijuana in states that have decriminalized weed, said Michael K. DeGeorge, associate director of medical affairs at Ameritox, a medication monitoring company based in Baltimore.

In 2012, DeGeorge said, marijuana was “far and away” the most common illegal drug that first-time users reported using that year. About two-thirds of first-time illegal drug use that year was from marijuana. Prescription painkillers ranked second. The numbers work out to about 7,500 new users of marijuana each day, DeGeorge said.

The fluctuations in marijuana use coincide with how much risk people perceive it to have. Pot use by high school seniors peaked in the late 1960s and ‘70s when marijuana risk was considered low. By the early 1990s, thanks to aggressive public education campaigns about it being a gateway drug, teen pot use fell to its lowest levels, but it has been creeping back up in the last five years, which coincides with cannabis advocates’ efforts to repeal the prohibition.

Still, the numbers show marijuana to have some addictive qualities. DeGeorge said 58 percent of addicts admitted to treatment centers in the country said marijuana was their primary substance of abuse, and that 40 percent of all admitted addicts report abusing marijuana, whether it be their primary, secondary or even third drug of choice.