For Many Injured Veterans, A Lifetime of Consequences

One out of every ten veterans alive today was seriously injured at some point while serving in the military, and three-quarters of those injuries occurred in combat. For many of these 2.2 million wounded warriors, the physical and emotional consequences of their wounds have endured long after they left the military, according to a Pew research Center survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,853 veterans conducted from July 18 to Sept. 4, 2011.Veterans who suffered major service-related injuries are more than twice as likely as their more fortunate comrades to say they had difficulties readjusting to civilian life. They are almost three times as likely as other veterans to report they have suffered from post-traumatic stress (PTS). And they are less likely in later life to be in overall good health or to hold full-time jobs

Period and Cohort Changes in Americans’ Support for Marijuana Legalization: Convergence and Divergence across Social Groups

We cast fresh light on how and why Americans’ views on marijuana legalization shifted between 1973 and 2014. Results from age-period-cohort models show a strong negative effect of age and relatively high levels of support for legalization among baby boom cohorts. Despite the baby boom effect, the large increase in support for marijuana legalization is predominantly a broad, period-based change in the population. Additional analyses demonstrate that differences in support for legalization by education, region, and religion decline, that differences by political party increase, and that differences between whites and African Americans reverse direction. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings and by identifying promising directions for future research on this topic