Why Marijuana Is Still Illegal

Excellent and to the point list of seven reasons why marijuana is illegal, as written by Tom Head for About.Com read original here

From a prohibition-based perspective, marijuana is illegal in the United States primarily for these seven reasons.

1. It is perceived as addictive.
Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug on the basis that is has "a high potential for abuse." What does this mean?

It means that the perception is that people get on marijuana, they get hooked and become "potheads," and it begins to dominate their lives. This unquestionably happens in some cases. But it also happens in the case of alcohol--and alcohol is perfectly legal.

In order to fight this argument for prohibition, legalization advocates need to make the argument that marijuana is not as addictive as government sources claim.

2. It has "no accepted medical use."
Marijuana seems to yield considerable medical benefits for many Americans with ailments ranging from glaucoma to cancer, but these benefits have not been accepted well enough, on a national level. Medical use of marijuana remains a serious national controversy.

In order to fight the argument that marijuana has no medical use, legalization advocates need to highlight the effects it has had on the lives of people who have used the drug for medical reasons.

3. It has been historically linked with narcotics, such as heroin.
Early antidrug laws were written to regulate narcotics--opium and its derivatives, such as heroin and morphine. Marijuana, though not a narcotic, was described as such--along with cocaine.

The association stuck, and there is now a vast gulf in the American consciousness between "normal" recreational drugs, such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine, and "abnormal" recreational drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Marijuana is generally associated with the latter category, which is why it can be convincingly portrayed as a "gateway drug."

4. It is associated with unfashionable lifestyles.
Marijuana is often thought of as a drug for hippies and losers. Since it's hard to feel enthusiastic about the prospects of enabling people to become hippies and losers, imposing criminal sanctions for marijuana possession functions as a form of communal "tough love."

5. It was once associated with oppressed ethnic groups.
The intense anti-marijuana movement of the 1930s dovetailed nicely with the intense anti-Chicano movement of the 1930s. Marijuana was associated with Mexican Americans, and a ban on marijuana was seen as a way of discouraging Mexican-American subcultures from developing.

Today, thanks in large part to the very public popularity of marijuana among whites during the 1960s and 1970s, marijuana is no longer seen as what one might call an ethnic drug--but the groundwork for the anti-marijuana movement was laid down at a time when marijuana was seen as an encroachment on the U.S. majority-white culture.

6. Inertia is a powerful force in public policy.
If something has been banned for only a short period of time, then the ban is seen as unstable. If something has been banned for a long time, however, then the ban--no matter how ill-conceived it might be--tends to go unenforced long before it is actually taken off the books.

Take the ban on sodomy, for example. It hasn't really been enforced in any serious way since the 18th century, but most states technically banned same-sex sexual intercourse until the Supreme Court ruled such bans unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

People tend to be comfortable with the status quo--and the status quo, for nearly a century, has been a literal or de facto federal ban on marijuana.

7. Advocates for marijuana legalization rarely present an appealing case.
To hear some advocates of marijuana legalization say it, the drug cures diseases while it promotes creativity, open-mindedness, moral progression, and a closer relationship with God and/or the cosmos. That sounds incredibly foolish, particularly when the public image of a marijuana user is, again, that of a loser who risks arrest and imprisonment so that he or she can artificially invoke an endorphin release.

A much better argument for marijuana legalization, from my vantage point, would go more like this: "It makes some people happy, and it doesn't seem to be any more dangerous than alcohol. Do we really want to go around putting people in prison and destroying their lives over this?"

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Legalize it, tax it, save the economy. It's time.

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One small story

Early this morning my friend Lydia died after nearly a year of living with Breast Cancer. Until she was diagnosed and began chemotherapy, she never smoked marijuana. Toward the end of her life she became an advocate for the medicinal use of weed because as she told me many times, it helped her with the nausea and it kept her appetite up enough to survive longer than was expected. It was important for her to have those extra months. She used them well by filling journals with thoughts, advice, wisdom and wishes for the two young daughters she was leaving behind. Many times it gave her the extra bit of motivation she needed to write that last important thought, that small piece of memory she thought they would need years from now. For those who fight against the legalization of marijuana, I want you to keep in mind the image of her daughters ten, fifteen years from now reading those words she left for them, feeling the appreciation and gratitude at the strength she found in herself to leave them for her. If you then still think it's wrong to make marijuana available to people like my friend, then I suggest you offer your heart up for transplant because you sure aren't using it.

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Subverting politics by growing your own.

Any great societal change has always started with the individual. Right now we are at a point in time where the economy sucks and millions of dollars are still being wasted on the so-called War On Drugs. It's the nature of bureaucracies to ignore change in progress until it wakes them up one day and says: sorry, there's no more money for you. Let's move on.

And that is what I see as the problem. The moving on part because there's still money left to spend, money that was appropriated during the great scare years of Reagan, Bush, and all the other fearmongering politicians.

Yes, many states have passed Medical Marijuana laws. Many states have the legal options in place to allow clinics to dispense medicinal marijuana to sick patients. But when you combine the millions of dollars still left unspent with the political and rigid erroneous view of marijuana as a drug instead of medicine, then nothing will begin to really change until that already awarded money is spent and authorizations need to be approved for more.

In these political times of budget wars and posturing, how likely do you think it is that when some local despot with a badge and a political agenda has to request more money to continue standing in the way of progress, he or she will actually get more? It's one thing to say the standard political crap to conservative districts in order to win on fear instead of substance, but paying for it will become the only issue that matters.

The expedient solution, the one that will create the less heat, will be to say these are tough times, everyone has to cut back, we can't afford to give you money to bust clinics and harass cancer patients. But since it will in some conservative districts, still be political suicide to advocate for legalization, the politics and small town wannabes will learn the value of looking away at what they don't want to see, and that is people growing their own.

 Eventually so many people will be growing their own that it will cease to be an issue and marijuana will quietly and quickly be legalized. Only then when the lure of all that taxable income is dangled in front of broke ass city governments, will the clinics be allowed to operate free of harassment and free of being used for some local yokel to get old Republican Dick and Dickess Head to vote him or her into office.

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Recipe For Medical Marijuana Butter

This is a great recipe for those who don't want to smoke or who have lung ailments aggravated by smoking. I also like that it can be made with the trimmings rather than the buds themselves as that saves on the costs and can sometimes be donated by those who want only the buds. It seems versatile enough to be mixed in with foods other than desserts as well for those avoiding sugar.

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