Move on to better times

Cactus had a post that advocated freer use of marijuana.

Here is another site that agrees.

Most people conclude that marijuana carries no special analgesic relief that cannot be addressed by other pharmaceuticals. The FDA did studies decades ago that support that conclusion, but some scientists assert that the studies had flaws which rendered them unreliable. The government refuses to do more studies despite the anecdotal evidence of exceptional pain relief in some circumstances — and despite the billions of dollars spent keeping marijuana illegal.

At some point, we have to do an honest cost-benefit analysis for criminalizing marijuana. We jail tens of thousands of people and create legal burdens for hundreds of thousands more every year for using or selling a weed that grows almost everywhere. It puts an equal burden on law enforcement, courts, and the penal system. In exchange, we get a dubious effect on usage for a drug that has the same addictive and intoxicating effects as alcohol.

Some will argue that marijuana serves as a gateway drug to more destructive substances, and that much is true. Many things act as gateways to harder drug use: abuse, poverty, boredom, and peer pressure, and especially alcohol, which is almost always a gateway to marijuana. Prohibition didn’t do much about that gateway drug, and decades of marijuana prohibition isn’t doing much for that one either — and marijuana might at least have a claim to be medicinal.