KALAMAZOO, MI

-- Among the texts I received on election night was one from my 23-year-old daughter. "Weed wins!" she wrote.

Was that really her take-away from Election 2012? Well, no. But she said she was pleasantly surprised that Colorado and Washington voters agreed to decriminalize marijuana while the Michigan cities of Kalamazoo, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint and Ypsilanti all moved a step closer to making pot more legally available.

These times, they are achangin'.

In 1990,

opposed the legalization of marijuana. This was an era when the crack epidemic was raging, "Just Say No" was part of the popular lingo and marijuana was seen by many as a "gateway" drug that could lead to cocaine, meth and heroin.

Today?

A majority of Americans under age 65 support legalizing pot, according to a

released Wednesday.

What some may see as another sign of the deterioration of moral values, others see as a shift prompted by common sense.

That begins with the fact that marijuana is far less addictive and linked to far fewer health risks than alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal.

Consider, for instance, that the

that about 40,000 Americans die die each year from alcohol abuse, excluding alcohol-related accidents and homicides.

The toll from cigarettes is even higher:

says that 443,000 deaths a year are linked to cigarette smoking, about one in every five deaths. And about 11 percent of the cigarette-related deaths are from second-hand smoke.

Meanwhile, deaths from marijuana? The CDC doesn't have a category for that, and the

, although there's no real statistics on that, either.

Even beyond the health issues, there's the issue of how marijuana affects behavior compared to, say, alcohol. While both are mood-altering substances, pot tends to mellow people out -- the biggest hallmark of a pothead is laziness -- while alcohol can make people aggressive and even violent.

My husband makes this point: When our college-age daughters are walking home late at night, he'd much rather have them run into a strange man who is stoned versus one who is drunk.

There's also growing awareness that having marijuana as an illegal drug tends to flunk the cost-benefit analysis in the eyes of many people.

including Milton Friedman

publicly endorsed a report by a Harvard University economist who estimated that that legalizing marijuana and taxing its sale would save $7.7 billion in state and federal spending on the criminal-justice system and yield up to $6.2 billion a year in taxes.





on the report quoted Friedman, who died the next year at age 94.

"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana," Friedman told Forbes. "$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes."

Of course, there's people on the other side of the issue, too. They say that legalizing marijuana could greatly increase its use, encourage the development of high-potency varieties, lead to more auto accidents linked to substance abuse and perhaps increase use of alcohol and other drugs.

Among people who have

, a professor at University of California Los Angeles who co-authored the book "Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know."

But in a

Kleiman says that the arguments for and against legalization of pot have been largely theoretical. Now, he said, those theories can be put to the test in Colorado and Washington.

"The obvious way to learn something about marijuana legalization would be to try it out one state at a time: relying on what Justice Brandeis called 'the laboratories of democracy,' " Kleiman wrote. "If Colorado’s legalization went badly, that would be a much easier problem to correct than if the mistake had been made on a national basis.

"They might succeed, or they might fail," Kleiman wrote about Colorado and Washington. "In either case, the rest of us could learn from their experience."

Julie Mack is a reporter for the Kalamazoo Gazette. Contact her at jmack1@mlive.com or 269-350-0277, or follow her on Twitter at Twitter.com/kzjuliemack For all posts by Julie Mack, click here.