Marijuana is a pretty boring drug, it's the kind of thing that could be sold at the supermarket, gas station, hardware store..etc with very little problem & minimal regulation. It simply doesn't need it and why anyone seriously considers it a "threat to society" I will never understand.
There really is a mass hysteria out there about drugs, it's worse in the female population if you look at the polling data. Until we can get the soccer mom's to reason the problem out and look at the evidence with their own eyes & think about how it could hurt their own children it wont get better. There is a certain amount of "payola" involved to get magazines that cater to women to run endless series of scare stories about drugs, this was exposed in a salon piece not too long ago & looking at a typical stack of women's magazines I would have to assume this tactic is still ongoing by the DEA/ONDCP. Interestingly enough, women are far more likely to be prescription drug (ab)users.
I guess they feel the sanction of their doctor(s) makes it "okay".
The hysteria about some hard drugs extends even into the medical profession. Even doctors are shocked to see chronic pain patients "functional" on what I would consider moderate doses of opioids & other drugs but some of them consider them "sky is falling" doses.
Even the DEA is highly confused. Natural THC is CI, synthetic THC in the form of Marinol is CIII.. When they couldn't find a real threat to justify their budget they started going after khat, something almost no one outside of a handful of somalians uses anyway and doesn't do all that much & was unlikely to ever be a problem even for those who did. They can't seem to tell the difference between doctors & the taliban either. I guess it's hard to have a coherent position when so much of your basic premise is built on a near religious mythology that clashes with the real world. The folks who started the Spanish Inquisition had a nice mythology of demons, witches, spells, and nothing was going to deter them either as it 'made sense' to them - they felt the ends justified the means too, no matter how bad those means were. Perhaps at it's core we are dealing with a problem that is closer to a religious belief system, though I can not truly believe that all of these folks are so naive in what they are doing & the distortions they tell - it may be they feel the end justifies the means - but I can't see all of them as being people of good moral fiber and still being able to carry on causing the harm they do.
