Here's my two cents about marijuana:
First off Dow Chemicals is the reason we outlawed it in the first place. Dow had come up with a wonderful new way of processing wood pulp into paper, but was having a hard time competing against local hemp growers, so they got their lobbysts up to Capital Hill and got a law passed making Marijuana a controlled substance. No one actually told anyone that marijuana was actually hemp, so it passed with no resistance, and then all of a sudden task force teams burned fields and arrested these evil hemp growers. That pisses me off the most. Dow's process has damaged people, and our environment, more than any pop smoker, not crack-whore, has. If I had a few million dollars to throw into a decent advertising campaign for marijuana, I bet I could get some new laws passed. Maybe not having it sold next to the Marlboros or Camels, but atleast we could go back to hemp paper and stop cutting down all the trees...
Secondly, does anyone remeber Reefer Madness? It's a little propaganda film from the 40-50s that portrayed marijuana as a dangerous drug that made you kill people and act completely out-of-control. I'm sure that even alcohol, under the right circumstances and with the right mind, could cause a person to act out and become enraged. The problem is not nessisarily(sp?) with the drug, but the chemical make-up of the person involved. Just as an upper might have a totally different effect on one person than another, any drug can invoke different responses from different people. For me marijuana doesn't cause me to act out and kill people at random, it helps me sleep at night, and sometimes I'll lite up after a hard day at work. I use it responibily(sp?), and no one I haven't wanted even knows I do it. No one has ever seen me smoke without knowing what I was going to do before hand.
Lets stop blaming drugs for people's failures. If someone ruins their life and they happen to do drugs, then ask yourself if the drugs were really the root of the problem. Understanding why some people fall apart when it comes to addictive drugs, not marijuana, could lead us to a better treatment for them, but locking them away, or putting them into a position that they end up killing themselves won't solve a thing.
The problem with this whole debate is that people, as a society, shun whatever isn't in the majority, period. Since we all don't smoke, then no one should. Ask someone who doesn't drink what his views on prohabition were, or talk to a vegitarian about meat.
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