Decriminalise drug use: poll

The large sample size reported in this article would appear to add credibility to the opinion favouring decriminalisation.

The representativeness of the sample, however, can be questioned from several standpoints:

1. being a phone-in, generally only people with a strong opinion will participate in the voluntary poll;
2. only listeners to Triple J will be able to phone-in and it is acknowledged that this group is biased toward younger members of the population;
3. people actually have to be listening to participate and hence the poll is restricted to people who are near a radio at the time; and
4. people could phone-in more than once.

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