 By Gary Grimes, with Euan Wilson | Excerpted from the November 2013 Socionomist |
White Widow, Sour Diesel, Maui Wowie. When the smoke clears in the medical and recreational marijuana industries, pot strains like these may be as recognized as Tylenol and Budweiser.
In this bold article, Gary Grimes and Euan Wilson reiterate that social mood is bringing the longtime American prohibition of marijuana and hemp to an end.
Here is an excerpt of Grimes and Wilson’s November 2013 report.
The US attorney general is assuring states of their right to regulate marijuana; Mexican officials are considering legalization measures. Respected doctors are taking stands for medicinal uses. And public polls are swinging in pot’s favor – even Republican Senator John McCain recently said publicly that “maybe we should legalize.”
Even NORML, an organization “working to reform marijuana laws” for more than three decades and a reliable source of news on the topic, seemed surprised by a recent poll from the Bible Belt state of Louisiana:
It is often said that the South will be the last region in the United States to take up marijuana legalization, but, as support grows nationwide, it is becoming evident the southern states likely won’t be left behind. Polling data released today by the ACLU of Louisiana revealed that 53% of Louisiana voters supported regulating marijuana in a manner similar to the models approved last November in Colorado and Washington. Only 37% were opposed and 10% were not sure.2
There was also a recent surprise in Louisiana’s neighbor, Arkansas, when a 2012 ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana failed “but came surprisingly close, winning 48.5% of the vote, and encouraging Arkansas activists to try again (in 2014),” reported StoptheDrugWar.org.3
The once-lopsided debate has segued into a crescendo of opposition against prohibition.
The Socionomic Connection
It’s a bold claim, but history proves it out: Positive-trending social mood drives prohibition of substances such as alcohol and marijuana; negative-trending mood drives tolerance and relaxed regulation.
Tolerance increased during the bear market of the 1970s then decreased for 20 years during the bull market. As recently as the mid-1990s, Gallup showed roughly three-quarters of American supported marijuana prohibition (see Figure 1). But the numbers began to decline sharply following the peak in the broad Value Line index of stocks in April 1998.
From a socionomic viewpoint, this trend reversal pairs nicely with the timing of peak optimism. Elliott Wave International has argued that since 2000, we’ve been in a prolonged period of negative trending mood at Grand Supercycle and Supercycle degrees. American’s growing support for marijuana legalization, now at 58%, is compatible with this idea.1
Figure 1
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In this eight-page article, authors Grimes and Wilson:
- Analyze marijuana and peripheral industries as investment opportunities
- Examine the global hemp market, its medical and industrial uses, and related government legislation
- Discuss the dependence of the US prison system on marijuana arrests
- And forecast a spike in drug-related violence prior to legalization
This article provides one of today’s most illuminating case studies of social mood’s impact on society – locally, globally, commercially, and morally.
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Most economists, historians and sociologists
presume that events determine society’s mood. But socionomics hypothesizes
the opposite: that social mood regulates the character of social events. The
events of history—such as investment booms and busts, political events,
macroeconomic trends and even peace and war—are the products of a naturally
occurring pattern of social-mood fluctuation. Such events, therefore, are not
randomly distributed, as is commonly believed, but are in fact probabilistically
predictable. Socionomics also posits that the stock market is the best available
meter of a society’s aggregate mood, that news is irrelevant to social
mood, and that financial and economic decision-making are fundamentally different
in that financial decisions are motivated by the herding impulse while economic
choices are guided by supply and demand. For more information about socionomic
theory, see (1) the text, The
Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior © 1999, by Robert Prechter;
(2) the introductory documentary History's
Hidden Engine; (3) the video Toward
a New Science of Social Prediction, Prechter’s 2004 speech before
the London School of Economics in which he presents evidence to support his
socionomic hypothesis; and (4) the Socionomics Institute’s website, www.socionomics.net.
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