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Can We Be Sure The War On Drugs Is Worth Fighting?
Did you know the war on drugs is founded on racist principles? Prof. Stephen Davies shows the historical thought process behind banning drugs. One of the main reasons drugs were banned initially is because people were concerned drug use would lead to interracial relationships. Can you imagine someone making that argument today? Yet it was a principle reason for some of the laws banning drugs that we still have. Other reasons for banning drugs included fear of conspiracies and the misguided notion that the government somehow has a right to the productivity of its citizens. All three of these reasons are truly absurd, but all three were historically used as arguments that contributed to the war on drugs. If these are the arguments on which the drug war is founded, can we be sure it's a war worth fighting for?
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I'll just leave this here...
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"No Kidding? (There Are Actual Rights In The US?)From the no shit file we have this:
This is from the ruling where the judge gave Chicago 180 days (six months) to re-write their law banning gun stores, stating that the city's law was clearly unconstitutional.
Well, duh.
But let's step back a bit because this really does speak to the issue, doesn't it?
From The Declaration:
Note: The Laws of Nature establish equal station, not man and therefore not Government.
The root of these unalienable rights are found in the fact that one has, by virtue of being human, ownership of one's own person.
That is, you, and you alone, have the title, right and sole interest in the sack of meat that comprises your corporeal body. Nobody else does. You, and you alone possess that and you don't possess it because a King, a President, a Congress or a Parliament said so, you possess it by mere fact of your humanity.
Governments are instituted for one -- and only one -- purpose. To provide a means other than by taking one another's lives to secure that fundamental right and all that flows from it.
Absent government the only means of deterring someone from taking your right to self-ownership for themselves is to use physical force against them, and all such contests have the potential to devolve immediately into lethal force. This is undesirable, for many disputes have end-points that have no particular reason to devolve into one party (or both!) dying.
This does not mean that all disputes do not end in death even with government, but it does mean that a just government increases the odds that every-day and reasonable disputes will end in a fashion short of death.
There is no other just purpose for the existence of a government cited in The Declaration.
At the point that it becomes clear that the existing government exists primarily or even exclusively for other purposes it is the right of the people to alter said government if possible, or destroy it if necessary, and replace it.
The people not only have the right to do so they have the duty to do so.
If you do not accept that you, and only you, own your sack of meat, then there is nothing further to discuss. You are not an American and whatever goals you choose to pursue politically are those not of American values. You thus are one of the people who the men that signed the Declaration were talking about.
If you do accept that you own your sack of meat then you must have the right to attempt to prevent its destruction irrespective of who is trying to destroy it. The only time that your right to do so is properly infringed is when you have attempted, or are imminently attempting, to damage or destroy someone else's sack of meat.
Now not all such means of destruction are by gun, baseball bat or knife. If you steal from someone you are in fact attempting to destroy their sack of meat; your theft may or may not cause such a destruction but your intent is to diminish the ability of that person to use that possession, whatever it may be, to further his or her own existence. That is, by definition, an attempt at destruction, because if I own my sack of meat then I have the right to determine what happens to it and to use my abilities to make its existence better. Your attempt to diminish same through the use of force or fraud is thus a crime. The only means by which you may take my possessions lawfully is to freely negotiate with me.
That is, I have the right to diminish or enhance my opportunity by whatever negotiation I choose of my own free will, without being conned or otherwise deceived, to enter into. If I choose to drink myself to death I have that right, because my sack of meat is my property and I have the right to destroy my own property. You, on the other hand, do not have the right to force me to drink myself to death, nor do you have the right to adulterate what I consume without honestly telling that you have done so, because in both cases you are attempting to destroy or diminish my property (my person, that is.)
In the instant case since I have the right to prevent you from murdering me, and since the only means known and ever invented by man (thus far) to equalize the weak and the strong, the male and the female, the old-and-infirm and the young-and-scrapping is the firearm I thus have the right to keep and bear defensive weaponry for that purpose. It is only when I attempt to, or do, use said weaponry for offensive purpose, that is to harm another beyond the boundaries of defense of my sack of meat from outside aggression, that I have committed an offense.
That is what Nature's Law states. That government widely disrespects Nature's Law and your ownership of your sack of meat is not material to what Nature's Law is.
In addition, and to the point, one does not need to seek permission before choosing not to be victimized in this fashion. Such a demand is in fact both an assault and extortion as it is a demand to not take an action that one is entitled by Nature's Law to take, backed by the threat of force.
Indeed each act of such disrespect by a government, and each improper act of punishment for an action that is in conformance with Nature's Law places yet one more bit of mass on the scale justifying the alteration or abolishment of that particular organ of government.
One would think that governments formed, directly and indirectly from this original document would take good heed of this fact, for it is a fact, and not subject to dispute. Alas, it seems that in the intervening 200-odd years there are many who think that such founding principles are mere fantasies, as if the words written on that page never were written at all, nor did the brave men and women 200-odd years ago stand and demand those words be respected, along with being willing to enforce that demand if it became necessary.
I note for posterity that it did indeed become necessary.
One would hope that such an event would never need to be repeated, because in point of fact no organ of government founded through The Declaration can claim legitimacy while at the same time tracing its roots to that document.
Alas, it seems that certain political subdivisions of this nation have forgotten from whence they came.
It is my sincere hope that they choose to remember."
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Kudos to KD.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=227753
Duc888
Right on, man
drugs fund terrorists terrorist fund bankers bankers fund cops and pols.
it ain't stoppin boyo...........
I can see the rationale for making certain types of drugs illegal due to their severe mental/physical addictions & side effects but there isn't a single metric on which the 'War on Drugs' has succeeded when Nixon announced it in '69.
Also doesn't address the much more profound issues of addiction and ODs with prescription drugs now too.
If you know the true risk, inform yourself and act accordingly, you can do a lot of things.
Ignorance, which is perpetuated by the 'WOD' and carelessness are the problem.
Oh, and just so it doesn't get ignored, the big killer is nicotine addiction - kills way more than smack.
Nicotine is addictive, its the other things in the smoke that kills.
Fiat credit addiction and dollar hegemony kills more than any other addiction.
"but there isn't a single metric on which the 'War on Drugs' has succeeded when Nixon announced it in '69. "
Actually it's been fantastic for Banksterz.
"In 1995 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) announced in a press release the publication of the results of the largest global study on cocaine use ever undertaken.
Coca
The study concluded that the use of coca leaves appears to have no negative health effects and has positive therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations.
The most important recommendation holds that: "WHO/PSA should investigate the therapeutic benefits of coca leaf" and a broader statement on researching the impact on health at individual and population levels of different legislation and drug control measures.
Cocaine
According to the study, cocaine-related problems should be kept in perspective. Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use.
Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common for intensive, high-dosage users and either unknown or very rare for occasional, low-dosage users.
Publication banned
A decision in the World Health Assembly banned the publication of the study. The US representative threatened that "if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug control approaches, funds for the relevant programmes should be curtailed". This led to the decision to discontinue publication.
A part of the study has been recuperated and is now available on the TNI's website. We feel this information is valid, important and needs to be available in the public domain."
http://www.tni.org/article/who-cocaine-project
But I assure you that millions of victimless offenders are imprisoned for your protection and for the good of society... I mean... Drugs are bad... Right?
Fuck the Pigs!
why do these videos have the music so loud you can't hear WTF the narrator is saying???? i find this happens a lot and even in some movies as well.
in this case it is to distract from the facile
treatment presented by way of the monologue.
Shutting down the war on drugs, even just for marijuana would put a crimp in many powerful wallets.
The security industrial complex and the private prison industry would fight tooth and nail to ensure this doesn't happen.
Federal prohibition always fails. Drugs is a medical and social issue, best left for the locals to deal with as they see fit.
Hubris is a far larger issue with far more innocent victims, more severe consequences.
As far as those who make the claim drugs raise the cost of their insurance - do you have insurance or a managed care pre paid fraternity card ? No such thing as health insurance, one can only insure against cost of the lack of health.......
Here is one of GW's posts - US soldiers guarding opium poppy fields in Afghanistan:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/14066.html
Yup, that's right: let your eyes drink in the images of US soldiers and marines providing armed security to the opium poppy fields in afghanistan.
Say, do you think that the US government is somehow involved in drug trafficking?
Nah, that's just crazy talk...
...uh...
I will REPEAT that I rather like this video essay, and this little article, better that the video embedded in the article above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5t3j6xQLmY
Funny FKN Planet - Deek Jackson
Hour long collection of video essays.
At 14:45 mark begins one on drugs.
Segment ended at the 21:18 mark.
http://www.marijuanaparty.ca/article.php3?id_article=440
Rat Trap
"Liberty" based arguments are nice little jewels, floating free in an abstract idealized space, which can never provide any real solutions, because they are not connected to the real world, in the sense that the most basic question should be asked about how "liberty" is supposed to operate in a world where the most basic scientific idea is the conservation of energy. (I have ways to answer that question, involving the concept of SUBTRACTION, but I will not bother to elaborate that here.) Since nothing can be made out of nothing, nor sent to nothing, the notion of "liberty" lacks any operational definitions which can connect it to the real world, except by facile arguments regarding exceptions which result in fudging it more and more, until that concept blurs out of existence.
With that preface, I would respond to this kind of video as providing some good historical analysis, BUT which then tends back towards the false fundamental dichotomies and related impossible ideals which are promoted by people who like their ideologies to be simplistic. However, the real world is almost infinitely more complicated that than, in fractal ways.
The war on drugs is 75% the war against marijuana. That war is the single simplest symbol, and the most extreme particular example, of the general pattern of facts that the social pyramid systems DID segue from slavery and racism into becoming a war against (some) drugs along the way. Our contemporary civilization is a social pyramid system, which is a sophisticated system of social slavery, whose primary components are debt slavery, backed by wars based on deceits. The war on some drugs was really a war based on deceits, whose real purpose was to advance debt slavery systems, because that is what everything else is integrated into in our current kind of civilization. Furthermore, just like that debt slavery drove its numbers to become debt insanities, the war on drugs, being based on backing up lies with violence, which can never make those lies become true, also has driven itself towards psychotic breakdowns. The psychotic breakdown of the war on drugs is one small component of the overall psychotic breakdown of the current system of debt slavery, backed by wars based on deceits. In that context, the war on drugs has become a relatively trivial aspect of that overall psychotic breakdown processes.
To understand warfare better takes one on a much deeper journey than to merely understand the war on drugs, which should be seen in the context of understanding warfare generally. The oldest book on the Art of War starts by saying that success in war depends on deceits, and ends by saying that spies are the most important soldiers. Add several thousand more years of the history of Neolithic Civilization to those basic insights, whereby science and technology were primarily applied and selected to develop better ways to back up deceits with destruction, and one has the contemporary global situation.
Governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals. Everything that governments actually do necessarily fits within that frame of reference, including, of course, the so-called "war on (some) drugs." Of course, that has created a Bizarro Mirror World where the truth about hemp is that it is the best plant on the planet for people, for food, fiber, fun and medicine, and THEREFORE, the government rebranded hemp as marijuana, which was asserted to be almost as bad as murder. OF COURSE, that is a manifestation of the basic social facts, of DEBT SLAVERY BACKED BY WARS BASED ON DECEITS, which one will find everywhere else, if one examines the social facts in any other realm, like the profit from junk food system, and the profit from disease system, and so on and so forth ... Hence, in general, there is an inverse correlation that the war against some drugs is more against the best drugs, while the worst ones are legal. That fits into the overall context of the social pyramid systems, which depend upon a small minority being dishonest and violent, in order to control the vast majority, who are thereby kept ignorant and afraid. Nothing has changed, other than the slavery systems becoming more sophisticated. Therefore, OF COURSE, the economics of slavery drove the rationalizations of racism, and those morphed into justifying the war on (some) drugs, with the hottest buttons of the propaganda campaigns being sex and race.
Follow the money to its SOURCE to understand the ways that the combined money/murder systems manifest through the so-called drug wars. Especially, look at the history of the funding of the political processes, and the ways that the profit from frauds were able to go into feedback loops, to enable even more frauds. Generally speaking, the biggest gansters are the banksters, that dominate our political processes, and therefore, they benefit from every evil thing that they can possibly do, such as get wars based on deceits going, in order to increase the runaway debt slavery systems. The war on drugs was yet another episode in the historically amplifying pattern of a runaway fascist plutocracy juggernaut generating more reasons to build a fascist police state, in order to defend the interests, and advance the overall agenda, of that runaway fascist plutocracy juggernaut.
However, it is not good enough to stop there, because there were always deeper reasons why human beings were driven towards warfare, as an expedient and necessary resolution to some chronic political problems. However, the history of warfare has driven its paradoxical success based on deceits to drive society more and more insane. The way that Hemp Truth operates is a lot like 9/11 Truth. The world is generally controlled by Huge Lies, backed up with Lots of Violence. There really are nothing else but different systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies, in dynamic equilibria competitions with each other. Those who are best at operating those systems, for a while, in some places, get to call themselves the government of the country, or the corporations, or the churches, or whatever ...
The biggest bullies' bullshit social stories are able to dominate the social institutions, such as the school systems and mass media, in order to promote the propaganda that keeps the established systems of organized lies and robbery going, which act as feedback loops. However, in the longer term, there is paradoxically final failure from too much success at controlling society with lies backed by violence. Therefore, the established systems drive themselves mad, and towards their own self-destruction. In general, the readership of Zero Hedge is already way more aware of these kinds of alternative views of their society. However, the vast majority of people have barely begun to wake up to the full blown magnitude of the degree to which they are living in a Bizarro Mirror World, especially since that is a fractal fun house, shot through and through with almost infinite tunnels of deceits and frauds. Only in a society where there was a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system, where the public money supply had been taken over by private banks, who were legally able to make "money" out out nothing, as debts, while the government forced everyone, including itself, to accept that fraud, and operate within that fraud, would it have then been possible for the runaway take over of the schools and mass media be achieved to the point where they could be a series of wars on drugs, etc., which would backfire so spectacularly, from the point of view of what they alleged were their goals, while their real goals of more debt slavery, driven by more wars based on deceits, were so spectacularly successful at the same time.
The war on drugs never had any sane relationship to pharmacological facts, or rather, if anything, the drugs laws tend more to be inversely correlated with the scientific facts about particular drugs. However, the war on drugs was very good at providing excuses to build a bigger fascist police state, to advance the interests and agenda of the runaway fascist plutocracy social pyramid building juggernaut, that turned so many people into its road kill, while making a small group thereby much more fantastically wealthy and powerful. The war on drugs was promoted by the banksters, and their buddies, because their systems are set up so that they can profit from every evil thing that they can possibly do.
However, "evil" is as inherent to the world as is entropy, and therefore, chronic political problems exist which must constantly be resolved in some way, or another. My view is that videos like the one in this article are produced to promote the bullshit solutions of advanced by the classic kinds of reactionary revolutionaries. They are based on a correct analysis of historical facts, which reveal that the war on drugs was superficially absurd. However, that does not proceed towards deeper appreciations of warfare in general, and therefore, does not provide better ideas about how we might operate combined money/murder systems. For sure, the drug wars always developed within the overall social context where the debt controls were backed up by the death controls, which were operated through the maximum possible deceitful and fraudulent ways. However, that does NOT mean that false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals, such as surround the traditional notions about "liberty," can provide genuinely better set of solutions to the chronic political problems.
The only ways to better resolve the drug wars are to develop better wars in general, which means developing better death control systems. However, that is obviously something that very few people understand. The majority are still trapped within more or less believing in the biggest bullies' bullshit social stories, while a few understand those stories are bullshit, but then tend to promote their own preferred old-fashioned bullshit religions or ideologies, as what should be the basis for better solutions. The video embedded in this article was another little example of that overall social situation. Unfortunately, at the present time, it is so extremely rare for people to understand the human murder systems sufficiently better that there is barely any point in my attempting to present that perspective any better.
The foreseeable future is going to be the psychotic breakdown of the drug wars, starting with pot prohibition. That will merely be a relatively trivial symptom of the psychotic breakdown of the overall established systems of debt slavery, backed by wars based on deceits in general. In that real social context, better understanding of the deeper levels of truth about militarism, and the monetary system, are not likely to be going ahead, when everything else is falling down, as a general collapse into chaos, due to the ways that legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, can never make those lies become true, but only drive society as a whole to become more insane.
Of course, the drug wars were based on deceits, whose real purposes were to drive the globalized debt slavery systems. Therefore, of course, those deceits are revealed to have been absurd, when studied more objectively. However, the deeper truths are about how and why there IS, and MUST BE, some murder system, which backs up the money system, and thus, are the central controlling factors which regulate everything else that civilization does. Therefore, only a better murder system, providing better death controls, could end the war on drugs in ways which were superior. Any other notions about "ending" the war on drugs tend to be superficial nonsense, advanced by those who like to still believe in various old-fashioned religions and/or ideologies, which are based on false fundamental dichotomies and impossible ideals.
Tragically, better social psychiatry is practically impossible within the contemporary context of extreme cognitive dissonance, and its resulting psychotic breakdowns. While I may like to daydream about presenting more radical truths, in the real world today we are so totally overwhelmed by huge lies that there is no practical political point to try to promote more radical truths. Rather, we are looking at out-of-control systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, which are not effectively resisted by the controlled opposition to those entrenched systems. While there is no doubt that the war on drugs was based on deceits, which were absurd, BUT, whose real purpose was to promote more debt slavery, very few people understand that, and almost none understand it deep enough, because deeper understandings of the combined money/murder systems are almost nonexistent in our contemporary culture.
Hey RM, finally got time to read that article's link last week after you'd posted it in reply a few weeks back - thanks for that, it was a very interesting read. I watched one of Louis Theroux's documentaries about the drug/street/gun culture in Philadelphia since we last discussed this topic (I expect its on youtube somewhere if you're interested), and I could not help but see the whole sorry situation is terms of the rat-trap plus Calhoun's observations of social decay and maternal-disconnection-collapse. Frankly the similarity seemed pretty stark on the face of it within that doco. I also could not help thinking that the Police were as big a part of the problem of where that society's going as the dealers and random killers. The police were very belligerent and cynical, and I'm sure they think that's a warranted and appropriate view. But when you stand back and look, it's only a matter of time until that population turns on the police en-mass, with weapons on every street, not just on one corner. It's almost incomprehensible where major US cities are at these days - anyway, thanks again for the article.
Thanks Element, I may get time to look at Theroux's documentary later.
Yesterday, BobRocket replied with this link, that presents a classical analysis of what the police problem has become:
http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm
Assassination Politics
By Jim Bell
"... One reason that ALMOST ANY "criminal justice system" would be better and more effective than the one we currently possess is that, contrary to the image that officialdom would try to push, anyone whose job depends on "crime" has a strong vested interest in maintaining a high level of crime, not eliminating it. After all, a terrorized society is one that is willing to hire many cops and jailers and judges and lawyers, and to pay them high salaries. A safe, secure society is not willing to put up with that. The "ideal" situation, from the limited and self-interested standpoint of the police and jailers, is one that maximizes the number of people in prison, yet leaves most of the really dangerous criminals out in the streets, in order to maintain justification for the system. That seems to be exactly the situation we have today, which is not surprising when you consider that the police have had an unusually high level of input into the "system" for many decades. The first effect of my idea would be, I think, to generally eliminate prohibitions against acts which have no victims, or "victimless crimes." Classic examples are laws against drug sales and use, gambling, prostitution, pornography, etc. That's because the average (unpropagandized) individual will have very little concern or sympathy for punishing an act which does not have a clear victim. Without a large, central government to push the propaganda, the public will view these acts as certainly not "criminal," even if still regarded as generally undesirable by a substantial minority for a few years. Once you get rid of such laws, the price of currently illegal drugs would drop dramatically, probably by a factor of 100. Crime caused by the need to get money to pay for these drugs would drop drastically, even if you assume that drug usage increased due to the lowering of the price. ..."
Thanks mate, I'll read it.
I started watching
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VElPxhM0BpI
Louis Theroux - Law and Disorder in Philadelphia (FULL)I don't even need these reasons to know it's wrong. The punishment for using and selling drugs is de facto immoral. It actually ruins lives and destroys families. We have lots of evidence. We also have evidence that the factual impact of drug use is less than the outcomes of prohibition. Down vote for this story. Oh this isn't reddit.
All of those excuses you mentioned are far better excuses for a war on something than the, "For King and Country!", that was used on the poor stupid sods at Gallipolli. So there's a slight 'progress' in the level of govt-BS-propaganda that we'll fall for, in 2014.
The war on drugs is a joke and a failure like the rest of our political class
Why is the war on drugs any different than the war on tobacco? Do you think pot is any better for you than tobacco? Will the health fall out from pot be any less than tobacco? Don't protected minorities disproportionally use drugs as well as tobacco? One thing will turn out to be true, an America full of recreational drug users will be a very unhealthy America. That will be the final nail in Obamacare and single payer's coffin.
Viator, if you have not read the comments i suggest you do it. If you did and this is all you had to say after reading them you are hopeless, you are wasting bandwidth, not to mention O2.
viator: One has to sift through DEEP PILES of propaganda to discover the truth that smoking tobacco is way worse than smoking marijuana: Health effects of smoking marijuana vs tobacco However, there are alternatives to both, like electronic cigarettes, as well as vapourizers for marijuana. (As well, there are interesting arguments that fertilizers used to grow tobacco were the hidden cause of some of the problems.)
Smoking should only be done ritually, and ceremonially, not constantly. It is not so much the smoking of good tobacco or marijuana that is the problem, as the latent self-destructive behaviors which become linked to degenerate cultural habits which are the problem. Those bad habits I regard as primarily due to evil deliberate ignorance, acting both politically, as well as personally. The mainstream legalize marijuana movement has a big song and dance routine built around the concept of "Harm Reduction" in that context, (although I do not like that attitude all that much, as I explain below.)
Anyway, here is some my typical kind of bla, bla, blah on that topic:
As a general rule, pregnant and lactating women, and their babies, are the most vulnerable to anything which is dangerous or harmful. If anything has real bad consequences, then the way those consequences will adversely impact upon the vulnerable, will should up first and foremost in the effect on women with their child. In this context, marijuana again has been demonstrated not to have any clearly harmful effects on pregnant or lactating women or their children. As contrasted with alcohol or tobacco, both of which can be proven to be harmful to the most vulnerable, the herb marijuana has not been proven to be harmful in this context.
After all of the money that the propaganda machine against pot has invested in attempting to prove something bad about pot, the failure to prove that marijuana is really dangerous or harmful is even more remarkable. The only so-called harm from pot that seems to appear shows up in the context of people who are living in the prohibitionist state, and are found in people generally adapted to living in that condition.
Most of the very few bad things that might be proven about pot, are only being proven about people using many different drugs and living generally unhealthy lifestyles within the prohibitionist state. It is impossible to find any true control group of people who legally consume recreational pot. Instead, every so-called test group must be picked out of a social situation of a well-established prohibitionist state.
There is no significant society anywhere where fully legal cannabis consumption, amongst a free and informed people, can be used as the reference point. Instead, anyone who becomes a subject of a science project on smoking cannabis has to be found in the context where their habit is illegal, and expensive, and, at least indirectly, takes some form of a social protest against the system. Many people who consume cannabis also hate their political system. The prohibitionist state always claims that it is good, and that illegal drugs and those who use drugs are bad. Furthermore, these prohibitionists, with all of their dishonesty backed up with violence, now have power to continue enforcing their prohibition. However, it is quite possible to reverse everything that the prohibitionists claim, and to tend to say that all of the bad things claimed to be caused by cannabis are really caused by the prohibitionist state.
One thing that drives people crazy is being forced to live inside of a crazy society. Most of established "psychiatry" has become organized quackery, well-funded by the pharmaceutical companies, that have been able to dominate and control most of the mainstream medical research and practice. The claims that marijuana makes people insane are probably more based on the fact that marijuana laws create an insane society that people have to live inside, and having to live inside of that insane people is what drives some vulnerable people to become insane inside of their insane society that surrounds them. IF there is any truth to marijuana making people go insane, then it probably more the influence of the laws upon the real lives of vulnerable people, and especially the most vulnerable young people, that is mostly responsible for doing that.
On the other hand, since the relatively worst particular lies that the prohibitionist state has promoted were the lies about marijuana, the final social result might be that those who hate that social system eventually do things to stop it. People can eventually go through a psychological process that enables them to understand their problems, and to stop only blaming themselves, and start also blaming the political conditions that have always been conditioning them.
If cannabis was legal, and all users did so with fully informed consent regarding their activities, then almost none of the harms or dangers would be left. Of course, that is not to claim that marijuana must be absolutely without any danger or harm. However, we still can claim that the worst danger and most significant harms are from a prohibitionist state.
It is now impossible to consume cannabis in any way that is not automatically perverted by prohibition. It is impossible to look at a gram of marijuana and not know that it could be worth dollars on the black market, instead of worth cents in a fully legalized white market. It does not matter if that gram was baked in a cake, or put into a capsule, the standing insanity of the monetary value of that gram can not be avoided.
People who make money from marijuana end up even more deeply buried in that insane situation than those who stay outside of it. The same gram that costs should only cost ten cents to grow, still can remain worth ten dollars in the insane system created under our current marijuana laws. People who grow or sell marijuana end up having to adapt, for better or worse, within an insane social situation.
Cannabis culture continues suffering from being a slave society. The stronger characters may do better, while the weaker ones do worse. The marijuana laws amplify the deviancy. Those who are competent and lucky can get rich, while those who are less competent or unlucky can have their lives destroyed and broken down into poverty, all because a plant was given an insane monetary value because of our insane laws.
It is now impossible to really know what cannabis culture would eventually become if prohibition was finally ended, and this is especially true because cannabis is cultural, in the sense that it is easier to imagine a world with pot plants, but no people, than to imagine a world where our human ecology did not run a prohibition based on dishonesty backed up with violence. Attempting to imagine any sane human ecology is practically impossible, and therefore, attempting to imagine the sane use of cannabis in a sane culture is almost impossible.
Depending upon individual circumstances, it may be better to consume a lot of cannabis, or it may be better to consume no cannabis at all. This is that same as saying that, depending on the overall situation, it may be better to use a hammer a lot, or it may be better not to use a hammer at all. Or, to put it another way, if you are big and strong, then using a hammer may be a good idea at the time, while, if you are small and weak, it may be better not to.
However, what is totally wrong is to say that using a hammer is a criminal offense, and all hammers ought to be destroyed. It is an egregious mistake in logic to make the kinds of statements about hammers that the government gets away with making about marijuana. It as ridiculous rhetoric to demonize hammers as it is to demonize marijuana. It is wrong to say there is some arbitrary threshold of safe hammers, or safe marijuana, that is true in all situations. Furthermore, the magic thresholds that the Canadian political process established have been strongly influenced by the corrupt effects of money & power in those processes.
To talk intelligibly about drugs, one has to back up and start again with a radically different approach. Each drug substance is a tool in the tool box. The important thing is the purpose behind the use of the tool. Our society is based on a system of ignorance and fear, and the laws regarding the use of psychoactive tools are designed to keep that system going. The truth is, and has always been, that marijuana is relatively safe, and certainly it is safer than the other common drugs. Of course, saying that one should use a particular tool, or not, is never invariably correct in different situations.
Using only marijuana, and nothing else, is like saying one should only use one kind of tool, like only using different kinds of hammers, no matter what the overall job or working situation may be. Using marijuana wisely and skillfully is as difficult as using any other tool or instrument. And, it is very tough when the overall purpose is not sufficiently well understood.
One of the most astonishing findings, as stated in the Senate Report on Cannabis, was as follows:
We do not claim, however, to have answered the fundamental question of why people consume psychoactive substances, such as alcohol, drugs or medication. We were indeed surprised, given the quantity of studies conducted each year on drugs, that this area has not been covered. It is almost as if the quest for answers to technical questions has caused science to lose sight of the basic issue!
Of course, that can be understood from the perspective of the war against consciousness, inside of the context of human ecology and the spirituality of the Whole. This otherwise surprising situation makes more sense from the point of view that our whole society is really controlled by dishonesty backed up with violence, and the basic structure of our political system is based on continuing ignorance and fear. There has been a deliberate effort to try to make sure that too many people never understand even the most elementary principles of philosophy. Again, the dominating forces find reasons to never even go there, and to attempt to prevent other people from going there!
The problem with a system that is based mostly on the bullshit of bullies, is they especially do not want people to ever understand more truth about that situation. All possible efforts have been made to stop people from being able to develop any genuine spiritual insight. All the bullshit that the bullies have been spouting covers all areas, and pervades all of our institutions. As a general rule, everything political is backwards, upside down, and inside out, to what it should be.
It is almost possible to automatically generate a complete set of political policies simply by saying we want mostly the opposite of whatever exists now. One can usually list should each particular political issue, and then simply reverse what is being done now to derive what we most probably be doing instead. The most important fundamental social facts are the ones which are the most suppressed. Almost everything ends up going in the opposite direction to what it should be doing. As long as one stays inside the system of the bullshit of the bullies, it then seems to be a sensible system, but as soon as one backs up and starts to look at the political system as a whole, that is when it becomes more apparent that it is quite crazy and corrupt.
Harm cannabis causes could be mitigated. Harm reduction through education, etc., should work better after legalizing pot. However, the real point of the marijuana laws have always been to be able to persecute people. The astonishing fact was that, according to past law, (and including proposed amendments to decriminalize) the only thing that was regarded as worse than growing the relatively harmless and quite beneficial marijuana plant was murder or manslaughter. Our marijuana laws only would make some sense if, in fact, it was true that one puff of marijuana would turn someone into a homicidal maniac, and two would make them addicted, and the puffs that they had to take afterwards would be fatal. These “reefer madness” lies are laughable, except that they were enforced by the police and prisons paid for by the government. Campaigning to end pot prohibition is also symbolic in the sense that our protesting could only be that possible in the context of a perverse society in which pot prohibition can exist.
From a sublime point of view, prohibition is extreme irony. There has to be a worst possible simple case to demonstrate that the radical truth, and the official dishonesty backed up with violence, get as far apart as can possibly be. That is the position of our predicament in pot politics. To actually have to argue that marijuana was never almost as bad as murder puts one in an absurd and insane context. That never made any sense! It was always driven dishonesty backed up with violence, and only by understanding the reality of the on-going ability to back up that absurd and insane dishonesty with violence is it possible to understand the truth about pot prohibition.
Whatever the real dangerous of marijuana influence may be, they are not a priority that society should worry about until after we have done something about other factors. As a general principle, we ought to have an holistic regard for relative dangers of different kinds of drugs and diets. We may all be drowning in the bad habits created by the long decades of pot prohibition. Everything surrounding pot culture has been made perverse by the prolonged prohibition effects. Smoking too much of anything is obviously not healthy.
With typical goofy logic, the propagandists point out that marijuana has more tar than does tobacco. However, the point is that the so-called "tar" in good marijuana is mostly the THC oil that people want to consume. Saying that marijuana smoking is ten or twenty times, or whatever, worse than smoking tobacco, because there is ten or 20 times as much "tar" is to totally misrepresent the facts. The "tar" from a good marijuana joint is a lot of THC, and very different chemically than tobacco cigarette tar. The more so-called tar in marijuana smoke, the better it is, and the less that a rational consumer needs or wants to smoke. On the other hand, most people who smoke tobacco almost always end up smoking way more than most consumers who tend to smoke marijuana.
People who smoke good marijuana feel the effects for several hours, people who smoke tobacco get a brief experience that lasts less than an hour. Therefore, someone who smokes a joint loaded with the so-called tar that they want to be there, then tend to stop, while people who smoke tobacco, then usually want to light another cigarette. Relatively few people end up chain smoking marijuana, in same the way that many people chain smoke tobacco. The effects from tobacco are brief compared to effects from pot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwrEo3sKAw
Addicted to Pleasure - Tobacco - BBC DocumentaryTobacco provides not much more than a little death rush. Some bad things in smoke, like carbon monoxide, and other poisons, are the similar in tobacco as pot, and depend more on how they are smoked, than what is smoked. With reference to psychoactive chemicals in the two plants, it seems relevant that nicotine evolved as an insecticide. Nicotine is toxic in itself. People who take an overdose of nicotine can die from that. However, no amount of THC in marijuana is ever fatal. These two extreme fact demonstrate the common sense view, and common experience view, that tobacco is far worse than marijuana. Tobacco is useless for anything except as a source of a natural insecticide. Marijuana has a million beneficial uses.
Only a society controlled by the bullshit of bullies could have ended up with legal tobacco and illegal marijuana. Only a society controlled by dishonesty backed up with violence could have maintained the claims that marijuana was worse than tobacco. Unfortunately, this crazy and corrupt system tends to flip from one absurd and insane attitude to another, rather than return to sensibly stable sanity. The emergent social stigma against tobacco looks like it is going to swing from one stupid extreme towards its opposite. It would be typical of our culture to take another century to turn everything from being backwards in one way, to becoming as backwards, except in the opposite way. The social machinery of robbery always tends to run amok. Instead of being satisfied with enough, it always wants more and more, with eventually backfiring consequences.
We can only have a dim and mostly frozen hope that truly scientific studies might eventually come to influence our society in the future to put things into proper perspective and keep them there. However, since science is a human institution, it is just as vulnerable to becoming controlled by lies and coercion as every other. Turning the attitudes and legal forces developed to attack some drugs unfairly has created a social climate where that climate’s change could result in similar attitudes and legal forces to still be abusive, and find new ways to misuse those institutionalized systems of social robbery.
I do not think that eventually making tobacco absolutely prohibited in the future is a good idea, although it makes much more sense than having done that to marijuana. The effects of consuming THC open up blood vessels, and increase circulation, but nicotine closes down circulation. Smoking marijuana tends to help the natural processes that clean back out junk in the lungs. Smoking tobacco tends to suppress natural processes that help lungs live.
Every genuine scientific study that could be used to compare smoking tobacco to smoking marijuana proves tobacco is far worse. However, one of the huge lies that is commonly presented in the news media is that smoking marijuana is more harmful than smoking marijuana. The "studies" that say otherwise are propaganda. Nothing is safe, but, not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Statistics and common anecdotal experiences demonstrated beyond a doubt that tobacco kills, but marijuana does not. More and more medical research seems to be accumulating that marijuana perhaps prevents or stops some cancers, although that will take a long time to verify or qualify.
As always, attempting to put any such knowledge into a proper social perspective seems to be practically impossible at any time in the foreseeable future. The details of the history of marijuana laws and proposed tobacco laws are deeply similar, although superficially they were totally opposite. A study of some history of proposed tobacco laws in Canada shows how political corruption protected the tobacco industry. After the government did not enact laws to restrict tobacco, then that Prime Minister, etc., retired to sinecures with major tobacco companies, etc.. Tobacco stayed legal in a deeply similar political way that marijuana was made illegal, with that caused by corruption by the effect of money in politics. Tobacco was one of the most profitable legal industries that has ever existed. That profit made it possible for a false glamour to surround smoking.
Smoking seems to almost become like a baby soother or sucky for adults. There are some deeper levels of subconscious satisfaction at play than people appreciate, even though they may not be conscious of it, and do not want to become conscious of it, and do not like being made conscious of it. There has been too much subconscious transference or imitation of smoking behaviors between tobacco and marijuana. Deeply established habits that are seen and imitated from an early age, and which satisfy deeper psychological needs, are extremely difficult to change. Attempts to change habits always meet with some resistance, frustration and anger. Smoking should become more symbolic and spiritualized, because it probably has deeper aspects that need to be addressed and coped with.
Addiction seems to be the typical, as above, so below, as without, so within, kind of problem. Blaming the drug is always too superficial and silly a way to understand the interdependent cultural and personal, social and psychological, systems. Most of the language about "addiction" is bullies’ bullshit, but nevertheless, there is still some truth to try to talk better about. Smoking marijuana fits into this hyper-complex reality. If marijuana was legal, people might eventually smoke it less, and instead consume it in other ways. Smoking was usually the least expensive way to consume marijuana, while, at the same time, leaving the least evidence of that crime behind. Smoking pot became part of the prohibition. Connecting marijuana to smoking is a red herring. Marijuana does not have to be smoked. Smoking seems the worst way to consume it. I regard smoking as primitive, not evil. In general, smoking should be symbolic. Smoke may be spiritual and part of the cycle of life.
At this high level of abstraction, life IS sunlight, steam and smoke.
Since plants use sunlight to combine
water and carbon dioxide into sugar,
leaving oxygen as the waste product,
then animals burn that sugar to turn
that sugar back to steam and smoke,
therefore, animals are burning plants
in order to stay alive, (and, that was
what also fuels plants to stay alive!)
It is not an exaggeration to say that human beings literally burn plants in order to survive, in one way or another. To say smoking is bad is to become divorced from our basic reality. The primitive is always still within us, and basic to our culture. To deny smoking is to deny our past and to deny our reality in the natural world’s carbon cycle.
To say smoking is bad is a ridiculous oversimplification. It makes no more sense to insist that smoking is bad that it would be to say that fire is bad. Human beings are always a "smoking" metabolism. We are a living fire, burning our food. We literally are smoking and steaming as we live. To say smoking is evil is to subvert our inner life. It is abusive smoking or a misuse of smoke that is bad. Judging whether there is use, misuse, or abuse, should be done within a total cultural context.
We ought not repress or deny primitive facts of life.
As the old saying goes, where there is smoke is fire.
Our life is a sacred fire.
The use of fire ought to culture into consciousness.
We will not get that from bad ideas of what is bad.
Smoke may be good to use ceremonially and ritually, however, smoking too much, and constantly, is probably a death culture trip. Still, smoking ought not to be categorically stopped. That would be an absurd and insane abreaction.
We should develop a higher culture that knows and respects its own primitive foundations. Our attitudes towards smoking ought not become a black/white linear morality. Our attitudes towards smoking should evolve into a better overall culture. However, our current problem is that pot prohibition, in the context of our whole social system based on ignorance and fear, etc., has produced bad smoking habits, which are were developed in the context of much bigger bad smoking habits that surrounded us. Somehow, the bullies bullshit gets internalized, and people end up smoking in stupid ways, but simultaneously become attached and proud of those stupid habits.
The lies got internalized as vicious cycles where smoking marijuana became the dominant symbol for all marijuana, and that symbol has tended to eclipse the rest of the potential for cannabis. As always, those lies end up stacked in perverse proportions that are mostly direct opposite of the truth. Instead of marijuana smoking becoming the smallest symbol of cannabis, with all the other ways to use cannabis being much, much bigger, marijuana smoking was driven to become the dominant symbol of marijuana inside of the overall pot prohibition system. Legal pot would make more possible various ways to better consume cannabis.
Being in favour of marijuana does not have to mean being in favour of smoking marijuana. Marijuana is much, much bigger than smoking marijuana. Being in favour of cannabis does not mean being in favour of harmful smoking habits. There should be no necessary connection between legalizing and smoking cannabis. The arguments against legalizing cannabis based on being against smoking cannabis are really moot and relatively irrelevant. They use an after-effect of the prohibition to then justify more of the prohibition, which is a wide-spread logical fallacy.
However, at the same time, an abreaction against bad smoking should not be overgeneralized to result in being against all smoking, and used as an excuse to be against smoke itself. Since smoke is an absolutely vital part of life, being totally against smoke would be to flip out from one absurd and insane view to become another opposite kind of absurd and insane view. Saying that smoking is bad, period, makes no sense. But nevertheless, we could and should still say that the misuse of smoke or abusive smoking is relatively bad.
Although my personal opinion is that smoking is the worst way to consume cannabis, and I think that smoking should only be symbolic, however, it is clear that the majority of people who like pot now do not feel the same way. People usually like their habits, and usually feel frustrated or angry when they have to change their habits. That seems almost always true, regardless of what the particular habit may be. The theory of changing to better habits rarely is easy in practice, and being motivated to actually change is a long, long distance away from an abstract intellectual idea that it might be good to change a habit. Most things generally true about changing food or exercise habits apply to efforts to change drug habits. People adapt to and become comfortable with the habits that they are used to. Changing any habit is harder than it seems it should be.
It facile to think of what should be.
& It is difficult to actually do that!
A higher frequency of knowledge could enable marijuana to be used better, in ways that have the most benefit and the least harm in particular individual circumstances. A good way to consume THC oil is with a vapourizer. A vapourizer evaporates THC oil off of the plant, and then one breathes in that vapour. Since the vapourizer should not go above about 200 degrees, (the boiling point of THC oil) while combustion burning goes up to about 450 degrees, this vapour has not been changed as much as the chemicals in smoke. There is not carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, etc., in vapourized pot, like there is in smoked pot.
A good vapourizer is about three times more efficient away to consume cannabis than smoking, since the smoking itself burns about two thirds of the THC in the joint in order to evaporate about one third.
A joint is a caveman’s vapourizer.
It is nice to sit around a camp fire when camping, but heating with an open fire is not efficient. Smoking a joint is primitive. That should never be seen as absolutely bad, but may be relatively bad, depending upon the real alternatives that culture could make possible. My personal experience is that the majority of people who try vapourizers still tend to continue to like smoking. There is no accounting for taste, nor the lack of taste. My prejudice is that most people are used to being primitive, and they are used to liking it that way. My experience is that rational arguments based on consciousness of evidence and logic usually make a minimal difference to the way people habitually behave, and unfortunately, that tends to apply to myself as much as it does to anybody else.
We always end up back inside of the social and environmentally reality that we started with, even after we learn a few new things that strongly suggest we should change that social environmental reality. Obviously, learning the truth about marijuana did not change the lies that controlled marijuana. Learning about alternative cannabis culture does not change the overall fact that marijuana laws were based on a long history of dishonesty and violence that controlled that culture.
In general, learning the truth does not change the social and environmental facts that we were born inside of and must still live inside of a society that is mostly controlled by dishonesty and violence. Of course, these things pop back up everywhere, every time we try to change our own habits, since we simultaneously have to try to change the habits of other people. We can not do either, without attempting to do both at once.
Marijuana is insanely expensive because of the on-going existence of the insane prohibition, and every different kind of cannabis culture that we consider still finds itself inside of that overall context. Smoking pot developed within the context of pot prohibition, and every attempt to develop a superior cannabis culture currently remains trapped inside of the established system of marijuana laws. Therefore, when we start to learn about vapourizers to consume cannabis, instead of smoking, that gives rise to problems that are typical in this overall context.
First, alternative methods or machines, from bongs to whatever else, that are used to consume cannabis will end up having traces of THC left inside of them. Those traces are evidence of a crime, and therefore the existence of those devices can be a source of anxiety, with some justifiable paranoia that evidence could lead to arrest and conviction for committing a cannabis crime. A joint turns into ash, with no trace of THC, and the roach butt end of the joint can be gotten rid of by being eaten, or otherwise disposed of. That is not as possible with a pipe, bong or a vapourizer, and that is even more true the more expensive that the pipe, bong, or vapourizer is.
In the current market, the best vapourizers are extremely expensive, because they have to have been developed and marketed in a marijuana black market, than those machines otherwise could or should be. There are different vapourizers on the market, and, some of them do not work well. Like all other products in our political economy, many producers are mostly interested in making a profit by selling cheap junk defective products at the highest price the market will bear. Since vapourizers mostly exist inside of a perverse marijuana black market, they consumers of those machines are even more at a disadvantage that consumers in a white market. People who buy vapourizers often have less information and less choice than people who buy legal appliances. All of that contributes to making most vapourizers on available in the current market to be too expensive and of too low quality.
It is unfortunate that many people have gotten a bad opinion of vapourizing from bad vapourizers. But, the ones that do work well are expensive, since they are not in an open mass market. One of the best current models seems to be the Volcano vapourizer, but it currently retails at about $600 Canadian, or the portable Vapir NO2 vapourizer, which retails at about $200. Compared to cigarette papers that cost a dollar, that is a steep price to pay. Even though it would pay for itself in the long-term, by more efficiently delivering the THC to the lungs, that initial price is a lot to jump to in the short-term. It also is way too expensive to use and maintain if one has to make sure it stays clean enough to have not traces of THC that provide evidence of a cannabis crime. It is also too big to easily hide to stop suspicion being raised that one is engaged in cannabis crimes that would provoke further investigations.
Therefore, in the current reality, despite good vapourizers being much healthier, and more efficient, and more effective than smoking, vapourizers are still of limited popularity in the context of the surrounding pot prohibition. If marijuana was legalized mass market, then a quite good vapourizer should cost less than a $100, and probably even better designs that were cheaper could eventually be developed. However, at the present time good vapourizers cost too much, and a used vapourizer contains evidence of crime, and thus better cannabis culture alternatives are really limited by the absurd and insane social environment that surrounds us.
Another possible higher technology is to remove the THC resin with pressure, resulting in a pressurized spray bottle of pot. A product like that was developed and is available in Canada under the brand name of Sativex. The technology is acceptable, but the economic situation it finds itself in is still very perverse. There are other, perhaps even better technologies that are possible, machines for separating the essential oils from plants that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but, at the present time, those merely compound all the other problems mentioned above regarding the simpler vapourizers. There are various other devices which depend upon sublimation, and have an intermediate price.
All of the higher technology methods of consuming cannabis, as good as they may well be, must necessarily be manifested in a cultural context, and that context now is an absurd and insane system built and maintained with dishonesty backed up with violence by governments. Therefore, all of the possible methods of harm reduction made theoretically possible by greater knowledge being applied in cannabis culture are difficult to really do, and instead, what mostly exists inside the context of the pot prohibition maintained by governments causes the opposite of harm reduction.
Only if cannabis was not longer criminalized by Federal laws would it be possible to have the best marijuana maximization and the most harm reduction. Laws regulating the commercial production and the consumption of commercial cannabis should be only provincial and local laws, and not any Federal law, except when the Federal Canadian government might rightly use its spending powers to subsidize more cannabis cultivation and availability.
Marijuana should be treated as what it is,
a relatively harmless and beneficial plant.
One supposes there could well be public codes about aromatic essential oils being vapourized, and so on and so forth, although that sounds somewhat silly, since vapourized marijuana does not stink anything like smoked marijuana does. If there were laws against vapourized pot, then, to keep balance, there should also be laws against the use of perfumes in public, which, obviously, right now seems rather far fetched. It is hard to imagine too many rational rules that stopped people from eating marijuana baked goods in public, where eating was otherwise acceptable. Even more so, swallowing capsules with marijuana preparations inside them (which is another possible way to consume cannabis) seems an even more private affair than even eating pot products in public. These kinds of "cannaceuticals" seem like good products, with a niche in a better cannabis culture.
One supposes the banning of smoking in public places should apply to pot similar to tobacco or whatever. However, second hand marijuana smoke is not nearly as dangerous as second hand tobacco smoke. But nevertheless, it is true that smoking marijuana has a pungent odour that not everyone likes, and that not everyone in public places should be forced to tolerate. In general, reasonably balance anti-smoking laws that applied to tobacco could be applied to marijuana. Since marijuana has so many other better ways it could be consumed than smoking, if marijuana was legalized, restrictions on marijuana smoking becoming a public nuisance would not be too onerous upon cannabis consumers. Vapourized marijuana does not smell as strong as smoked marijuana, and could not be nearly as harmful, as second hand vapour. Relatively speaking, there would have to be similar laws against perfumes, if there were laws against marijuana vapour, in order to put that into a proper social perspective.
Unfortunately, our present laws are not a sane compromise towards diminishing some minor public nuisances. Our marijuana laws are an insane rigidity in our politics. Everything actually going on suggests that there will be little harm reduction in the foreseeable future, and instead there will be way too much harm maximization by governments. Instead of reasonable laws maximizing the primary benefits from marijuana and reducing the secondary harms, our irrational laws are doing exactly the opposite, and are probably going to keep on doing that for the foreseeable future, as a tiny component of an overall global system of runaway insanities, due to them being based on the triumph of frauds.
Most of the language used in the so-called harm reduction debate is bullshit. That "harm reduction" sucks! The Marijuana Party uses the language of marijuana maximization. We should focus on obtaining the maximum benefit from marijuana for the maximum possible period of time, rather than primarily focus on minimizing the harm marijuana may cause. Since the language of "harm reduction" has sucked, that has become mostly a dead end of a half-assed paradigm shifting, that did not work. We should stop talking about harm reduction as being our primary purpose, and start talking about marijuana maximization as being our primary purpose. We should not let the prohibitionists continue to control the debate by talking about harm reduction as if the harm was primary. The benefits from marijuana are primary, and the possible harms are secondary. The Marijuana Party should talk about maximizing marijuana benefits as primary, and reducing the possible harm from misuse or abuse as secondary. The professional liars and hypocrites that control our politics now are surely going to maximize the harm caused by the way they pursue so-called harm reduction.
Eating or otherwise ingesting preparations of pot can be as complicated as the science of nutrition. What matters is the whole diet, rather than any one part. This is an extremely important principle throughout all of the different kinds of dynamic equilibria. There is never one simple thing that is the whole solution. It is the system as a whole that matters, and that should be applied to cannabis, just like everything else that is a component of any system of possible life styles or human behaviours.
The sheriffs departments in the US make big money busting people smoking and growing pot. Here in NC they can take your car and house and possessions for growing a plant. This red neck State will be the last to legalize pot because there is too much money to be made busting people.
the "war on drugs" is a business model.
#1 lie
#2 steal
#3 enslave people
#4 profit every step of the way (for police-state & associated contractors)
#5 destroy any other part of the non-government economy in the process if it's within reach
that's the business model.
For those who profit this continued fight is well worth it.
For the rest of us it will be the ruination of our economies worldwide, expanding the police-state, surveillance-state, unlawful behaviour by so-called law-enforcement & augmenting the power of bigpharma & drug cartels simultaneously.