Lawmakers are influenced from an older age.

Morgan Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the dissonance between voters and elected officials reflected an unwillingness to prioritise what some politicians still considered a peripheral issue.

“Unless lawmakers actually hear from their constituents . . . they’re not going to spend the political capital,” Fox said, “because it still has a little bit of that taste of a fringe issue.”

Callender, the Ohio representative, pointed to a generational divide, driven by a period of heavy lobbying against marijuana that had culminated with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign during the US’s war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s.

“A lot of the leadership in our party at this point is of an age where they were very influenced by that campaign,” he said. “It’s a subconscious thing among folks of a certain age.”