I no longer use weed. I have found it necessary to confront my addiction—not to weed, it was never addicting for me. But I have not used any illegal substances for more than seven years.

Now that it is clear that weed is a healing drug for many, when I think back to my using days and the sharing that took place, I think that at worst I need only think of myself as practicing medicine without a license. For that reason, I find the current practice sensible, in California and elsewhere, of allowing a doctor’s prescription.

Further, the recent estimate I saw somewhere that cannabis is in the top five domestic agricultural crops makes me realize how much our tax situation might be relieved if the product were legalized. Taking the profit out of the underground and moving it to a system of legalization would also reduce the levels of violence that plague my city’s neighborhoods, where street crime is out of control.

So it is not just a matter of tax money. By providing a source of income for the underground, keeping drugs illegal promotes the same levels of criminality and corruption as were seen during Alcohol Prohibition. I read that just recently New Mexico has begun to make provisions for medical marijuana. Not only citizens but law enforcement including the courts and public officials today are corrupted by the bad laws we have been given by short-sighted legislators.

Which is worse, marijuana or massive and systematic hypocrisy? We, who seem unable to learn from our own history, are repeating it by criminalizing a behavior that I can personally testify is at worst a health problem not a moral problem. It is a serious moral problem only for legislative candidates and public officials who manipulate the issue in order to get elected.

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All drug laws should be appealed. They creat so much of the problems associated with addiction and certainly with simple use of these substances.
The war on weed started way before 1972.....it was after prohibition was repealed that Harry Anslinger,the architect of our repressive , immoral and useless drug policies, began refer madness.
Marijuana has been shown to have many health benefits and does not cause lung cancer.
Nothing is harmless......not even water. Marijuana is the safest of all intoxicants ,including tea and coffee.
The reason it became illegal was the association it had with the counter-culture of the 60s and the fact that few people had the knowledge to counteract the unscientific propaganda which had put marijuana in a bad light.
Face it, almost everything you have ever heard about illegal drugs is a half-truth or an out right lie.
How many people know that while opioids,like heroin,while addictive are also non-toxic. There are at least 5 studies in the JAMA archives showing the cardio protective properties of opioids.
Few drugs actually kill brain cells. Alcohol does. In fact alcohol is toxic to all the tissues of the body and alcohol is the only drug that has been demonstrated scientifically to cause violent behavior in normally peaceful people.
Why are we wasting money and helping murderers buy guns,turning normally law abiding citizens into thieves and prostitutes and supporting drug laws which do not help the small number of people whom have problems caused by overuse of certain drugs?
The people who use drugs to excess should be able to get help on demand and the rest of us should have the choice to put in and take out of our bodies what we want.
REPEAL DRUG PROHIBITION NOW!

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Keeping pot illegal feeds a lot of people. The private prisons are making money from incarcerating petty offenders, local juristictions are making money through fines, and beauraucrats are paid well for organizing the "War on drugs".

Alcohol and tobacco raise a lot of taxes, weed grown in backyards will raise none.

Nice thought that pot will be made legal, but don't hold your breath (Pun intended).

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Talk about follow the money. The forfeiture laws that began during the Reagan administration have a turned into an industry of sorts with large amounts of property and assets seized thereby enriching local law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement is also quite enamored with high tech surveillance methods including helicopters and who knows what else. The whole prison industry, including unionized workers, are committed to this course & to an ever expanding prison population largely through privatized incarceration facilities. This cruel hoax that is the so called drug war has eroded our civil liberties, wasted huge amounts of resources better utilized elsewhere, and ruined countless lives of people whose actual harm to society is neglible. Time to bring this atrocity to an end. There are powerful vested interest who will mightily resist such an attempt, making for a long and difficult struggle, to restore sanity, justice, and decency to these issues.

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All those you admire are a bunch of pansy-asses including the Clinton-Obama-Schumer-Wellstone gang. Through out the bums and vote Libertarian !

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even if they're dead !!! LOL

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The author writes that "pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco." Why "arguably"? What is arguable about this fact? Is anyone claiming that weed kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, or even one? We need stronger arguments. Pot's risks are not "arguably" fewer than booze and ciggie-butts, the are CLEARLY FAR FEWER.

47 years old, pot smoker for 30 years, completely healthy, father was dead already by my age from drink.

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...so that Big Tobbacco can do as its Masters order and start putting all the radioactive and carcinogenic additives into it that will start killing all the new chain potsmokers far faster than tobbacco smokers.

The faster they die, the cleaner the air, the smarter the human race. Just think, a world without George OR Laura Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleeza Rice... looking pretty damn good now, isn't it?

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The one and only time I toked up was in 1973 when I smoked a joint of Acapulco Gold. The high was both fantastic and scary. I didn't like my brain being out of control which it was for five hours.

The experience was also enlightening. What harm to society had I caused by stupidly inhaling an intoxicating substance in the privacy of my own home? None, of course, which made me conclude marijuana should be treated like booze, with Americans free to grow indoor plants the same way they brew beer at their basements.

Hugh E. Scott, editor of King-George.biz -- the only website with hardcopy proof of White House corruption.

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Living in Holland we have legalised marihuana.
However Europa feels pressure by the USA about this.
Since you can buy in licensed shops so called: coffeeshop(alcohol not permitted) there are less murder, rip offs etc.
Although entrance not permitted under 18 this is still a problem.

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Gimme a room full of potheads over a room filled with drunks ANYDAY.

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After 35 years of "war on pot"(for the liquor and tobbaco industries) people still use it. Now we have a war on oil (for the nuke industry and zionist colonial expansion), how many years will they fight this one?

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is the major tool of the police state's war on people. If we want to legalize the kind herb, we need to liberate ourselves and our culture from all our fears of each other, which allow the police state to harrass civilians in the name of 'security' and 'public safety'. Our founding fathers didn't envision this, or if they did, they warned us against the possibility and put safeguards into the constitution to make it harder for the control freaks and greedheads to oppress the citizenry. I'm beginning to think that we as a citizenry need to recall daily, like a mantra, the last part of the enumeration of powers, which states: "Notwithstanding, all power remains with the People."
The people forced the repeal of alcohol prohibition, and we can do the same for pot prohibition. It's time.

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Under President Carter most of the enforcement was nearly non-existent. Except for the drugs coming in through our borders. Everyone thought that marijuana was just about to be legalized. Then people voted for President Regan and Nixon was back like never before.

The "Just Say No" campaign meant that people were not going to tolerate any drugs except from a doctor or pharmacy. All of those people are sucking up on 100 dollars a month pills now if they are not dead from their legal synthetics.

Conservatives seem to say they are all about deregulation but when it comes to individuals they want the regulators right up our port holes.

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I'm for total legalization, and have been reading these kinds of articles for years, but nothing changes. This article doesn't propose any specific action (that I noticed). I'd think NORML would have some concrete ideas on how to actually get the laws changed. However, when only 10 - 30% of Americans smoke weed regularly, and given the enormous amounts of money generated by keeping it illegal... I don't see any end in sight for the "war on pot".

Until enough people pressure their rep's in Washington, nothing will change. But the majority of Americans just don't care, rarely smoke pot, and can't be bothered to raise a stink over this particular issue. Most Americans don't even bother to vote... good luck on this one.

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I have smoked marijuana for 35 years, almost daily (if possible). I also have been employed in the legal field for the same period of time, working at 3 major law firms during that period. I've owned my home for 30 years and I have a 33 year old son who also smokes marijuana and who is the father of two boys, ages 4 and 2. Other than marijuana laws, we are very law-abiding and responsible people. My mother, on the other hand, was a severe alcoholic and a pharmaceutical drug addict. She actually had the drug addiction for many years prior to starting to drink, but once she started drinking, she only lived another 10 years and died of complications of cirrhosis of the liver. I tried once to get her to try pot when I was a teenager, thinking I could wean her off alcohol (fat chance). If she had smoked pot instead of drinking alcohol, she would probably still be with us today. There is no comparison of those two substances and their effects. People are more likely to die from the effects of food (diabetes, etc.) than marijuana. There has been a 20-year study of marijuana and the conclusion the researchers came to was that it is virtually impossible to die from an overdose. You might do something stupid due to paranoia (cause by its illegal status), but marijuana itself, according to the study, had not been responsible for killing anyone as far as they could determine. In fact, I believe the positive effects of marijuana use outweigh the negative effects. Marijuana relaxes people and makes them see the humor in life. People who smoke pot laugh much more often than people who don't, and studies show that laughter causes the release of beneficial enzymes in the brain. I am currently 52 years old, but people confuse me with someone closer to 35-40. When asked what I do to stay youthful, the only explanation I've been able to offer is smoking marijuana and laughing often. Thirty-Five years is plenty of time for any hidden ill effects of marijuana use to surface, and NONE have. The most dangerous thing about marijuana use is its illegality. Insofar as the argument that marijuana is a "gateway drug" is concerned, this is simply not true. Marijuana does not lead to hard drugs. Due to its illegality, the same people who sell other illegal substances may sell marijuana too. Hence, it is the fact that it’s illegal that causes it to be linked with other illegal substances. Marijuana laws keep a vast portion of the population from being able to vote. This fact makes all those who partake of it political prisoners subject to lose everything at the whim of our of-so-moral and upstanding politicians. IT IS TIME TO END THIS ALICE IN WONDERLAND MADNESS. We are ruining the lives of people for no reason and wasting vast amounts of time, money, resources and potential revenue, all FOR NO GOOD REASON.

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Pot smokers are not invloved in violent crimes. I don't think anyone has ever been arrested for murder while under the influence of marijuana. Can't say that about booze. There's a small segment of the population that worries itself half to death because people somewhere are enjoying themselves. They will always find something wrong. Jail time for pot is a way to keep the jails full and make money. The same can be said of the War in Iraq. More Big Biz. Thanks, ANNA

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took a stand and pushed for and won the passing of a Compassionate Use Act in his STATE of New Mexico. He said I don"t see it as being a big issue this is for medicinal purpose for people that are suffering." My God, let's be reasonable."

I read that the White House had urged him not to sign the bill. It IS a BIG ISSUE and every candidate MUST be made to take a stand ASAP. They are wasting my time otherwise.

Big Brother is afraid that if anti-prohibition advocates get a little [like relief for the suffering] they will want more.

The secret is out...." in a society where they give Prozac to shy teenagers, all MJ use is medicinal" Dennis Peron Prop 215

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Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was passed in 1937 using lies and racism against blacks and indiginous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Tax_Act

70 years later the Federal Govt. is still using the same xenophobia to cover up for it's lies.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article .cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/22/MNGDROPHME1.DTL
(erace space after "article ")

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Start with the "War on Terror"
Move to the "War on Poverty"
And lastly, end the "War on Drugs".

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Google "dumb ass" then look at your picture, and STFU already.

Can you BE a bigger pain in the butt?

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When will we end this madness and get serious about which drugs are harmful and which aren't??? At last count, there have been serious side-effects attributed to tobacco use, yet it is legal. Similarly, alcohol has been shown to kill thousands each year. I'm not saying alcohol or tobacco should be illegal but that drugs which have been shown to have no harmful side-effects ought to be legal. Or to go one even better: the government shouldn't concern itself with private issue, such as substance use/abuse. (Yes, it's radical, but so what?)

I understand, however, that many people/companies/corporations/governments are benefitting off of the so-called "war on drugs." Would that we could stop squandering the money/resources on that war and actually pour it into something like, say, Universal Healthcare! (As a sidenote, unrelated, banana leaves/peels could be refined and used as a source of paper...but aren't on a wide scale because the paper industry doesn't want this.)

Funny how smoking pot is illegal but a credit card company charging 25% interest isn't, eh?

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just wondering. i grew up under DARE

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I wonder where Armentano got the $20B number?

My sources say we've spent over $11B so far this year on the war on (all) drugs. DPA cites DOJ data and says "Between FY1991 and FY2000 more than $140 billion(4) has been spent at the federal level" A good guess is that more than that much has been spent at the State and local levels during just that 10 year period. So, I can't believe that only $20B—maybe only 2%—was spent on marijuana during the 35 year period!

And he says: "Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be." WRONG! I am one who argues that it is one of the least harmful substances we know of. It has a toxicity that is apparently too low to be measured.

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A note on marijuana and driving -- some legalization proponents will include in their arguments a call for strict laws and enforcement prohibiting driving a car while stoned, either as a misguided strategy to win over the general public or out of a genuine belief that this is a major problem.

This is a bad idea based on a faulty premise. The bulk of research shows that marijuana does not significantly impair driving safety, and if anything makes drivers more careful and less likely to cause accidents.

Opponents will often offer distorted statistics that purport to show cannabis use is implicated in higher accident rates but fail to mention the presence of other drugs, mainly alcohol, that are the real cause.

Of course, there are people who don't feel safe or comfortable driving stoned, but the great thing about marijuana is that those people will therefore avoid driving, since the herb has the opposite effect of alcohol in self-assessment of driving ability.

The worst thing about including a call for laws against driving stoned in a legalization pitch is that it perpetuates the myth that this is a real safety concern and is far more likely to lead to establishment of draconian anti-"drugged" driving laws, but without legalization, leaving everyone worse off than before!

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toward a renewed Reefer Madness theme, especially on Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs have done a couple of demon weed programs recently. On one he had a guy on saying that marijuana isn't studied is because researchers can't find any people who just smoke marijuana. I thought, aside from the fact that the Feds have made it nearly impossible for independant researchers to study the effects of marijuana, that the long term users I know, people who have smoked regularly for 30 or 40 years, all have jobs and homes they'd like to keep and are not the sort of people who would seek out unwanted attention by participating in such studies. The guy on Dobbs also trotted out the tired old meme that marijuana is a gateway drug. He claims that every single addict he's ever encountered started with pot. Well, I would be willing to bet more of them started by raiding mommy and daddy's liquor cabinet. I wanted to ask him if, by chance, he also knew that almost every addict he will ever encounter started out with mother's milk? Correlation is not causation!

Plus marijuana, Ronnie Reagan's old bugaboo as he imagined pot crazed hippies outside the White House walls leftover from his CA dreamin' days, prohibition has done more to erode our 4th Amendment Rights to the point that they are almost nonexistant and paved the way for other, more recent, outrageous abuses. The fact that the Supreme Court ruled it ok for corporations to take on law enforcement duties rightly in the purview of the government, accountable to citizens, set into motion the fusing of corporate and government powers chillingly along the lines of what Mussolini rightly described as Facism.

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by crippling the hemp industry. There is no thc in hemp, and it is the WORLD'S CHAMPION RENEWABLE RESOURCE. That's right, hemp is the single most greatest gift to humanity in the entire world. An acre of hemp will produce more fibre, more oil, more protein, more industrial products than any other thing in the universe. Higher quality fibre than cotton, better paper than from trees, more and better protein than soy, more and better oil than corn or rapeseed, and all with less fertilizer and pesticide required. It's like outlawing grapes because someone might make wine. So stupid eh? I predict an explosion of hemp products being the basis for a new future economy, one where the US has about the same status as Myanmar: an isolated, backward and insanely repressive regime.

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Would you smoke the whole thing to your head?
Would you package it up in grams and sell it for the price of gold?
Or Would you use it to make annointing oil like Jesus?

Does Prohibition even allow you to conceive of such things?

One of the key weopons of Prohibition is it's ability to artificially restrict the consciousness of people.

Have you ever seen 10's or hundreds of pounds of pot at one time?

Most people haven't.

Most people experience cannabis with small amounts, that because of Prohibition costs as much per weight as gold.

At those prices, and in such small quantity, most people AUTOMATICALLY choose smoking as a delivery method for the cannabinoids.

Because of Prohibition, most people never even contemplate to soak their gram in olive oil for weeks to make an infusion that can be used as a topical ointment to deliver the cannabinoids.
And even if they did think about it, most would never even attempt it because the cost is...wait for it...Prohibitive!

Ahhh, but if there wasn't Prohibition, and I could grow 250 sheckels in my backyard for next to no cost, I might finally be able to answer the question:

What Would Jesus Do?

If there wasn't Prohibition, one might be able to grow Sativa varieties outdoors rather than Indica varieties indoors. This would allow one to really experience the cannabinoid profile and unlock the true healing potential of the plant.

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That means a rather large chunk of Americans would be considered criminals doesn't it?

If everyone that smoked pot over there handed themselves in and INSISTED on going to court, what would that do to the court system over there?

Mike
legal highs

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Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

The White House lived by the principles of the southern strategy, and Dent's office had its own lingo. There were issues that mattered to "our" people, and those that mattered to "their" people. "Their" people were what the White House called "the young, the poor, and the black." The phrase rolled off the tongue like one word: theyoungthepoorandtheblack. The young were the longhaired student antiwar types for whom the president had open and legendary contempt; the poor and the black were leftover concerns from the Great Society.

Brownell daily read a dozen newspapers from around the country and clipped stories that played on those themes. He looked for stories about badly managed social programs, watched for currents of localized resentment, combed the columns for colorful quotes and juicy anecdotes the presidential speechwriters might use. He particularly kept an eye out for drug stories. Drugs were one thing the young, the poor, and the black all seemed to have in common.

Despite Nixon's assertion to the preelection Disneyland crowd that drugs were "decimating a generation of Americans," drugs were so tiny a public health problem that they were statistically insignificant: far more Americans choked to death on food or died falling down stairs as died from illegal drugs.

So Brownell was delighted that the media were inflating the story by melding the tiny "hard drug" herein threat with the widespread "soft drug".marijuana craze. Marijuana, Brownell knew, was a perfect focus for the anger against the antiwar counterculture that Nixon shared with "his people." Brownell dug out a-recent clip from Newsweek: "Whether picketing on campus or parading barefoot in hippie regalia, the younger generation seems to be telling [the middle-class American] that his way of life is corrupt, his goals worthless and his treasured institutions doomed. Logically enough, a good many middle-class-citizens tend to-resent the message."in an article Brownell might have penned himself, Newsweek identified the targets of that middle-class resentment this way: "The incendiary black militant and the welfare mother, the hedonistic hippie and the campus revolutionary." The young, the poor, and the black. Nixon couldn't make it illegal to be young, poor, or black, but he could crack down hard on the illegal drug identified with the counterculture.

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One thing that needs to be remembered here:

The say-no-to-drugs warriors always sell the anti-pot message as if it is solely a corruptor of children, and that's their only way to make it an absolute evil to middle Americans.

The thought that it could be used responsibly by adults like alcohol (presumably can) is completely whitewashed in any anti-drug commercial, and the absolute fact that millions of people drive wasted on alcohol and prescription drugs alone is so completely swept from the limelight as to be a non-issue, despite an average of 40,000 car-related deaths in the US every 365 days, roughly 40% of which were alcohol-related (that's 10,000 people, or 3 times the hysteria-causing amount of people killed at the WTC on 9/11/2001, not to mention 3 times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq thus far).

The whole advertising campaign is a total bogey, and increasingly unnecessary since the government in the US now knows completely that it can do anything it wants without justification and nobody can do a damned thing about it unless everybody agrees to revolt - with guns - which nobody EVER WILL, particularly a bunch of anti-gun progressives and generally peaceful pot-tokers, the very people who get the shaft time and time again. Which of course helps (guess who?) the Republicans come voting time because lefty pot-smoking felons can't vote at all.

It's no-win from the start. Our government is totally disgusting.

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Being instituted in 1937 by Harry J., Anslinger, mainly as a means to provide himself with a job.

The Schafer Commission wasn't even the first to recommend marijuana criminalization be ended. In 1944 The LaGuardia Commission on Marijuana released a report saying basically the same exact thing as the Schafer Commission would 28 years later.

To paraphrase Fiorello LaGuardia, there was no logic in anacting a law that couldn't be enforced, had no reason to be enforced and the people didn't want enforced.

In case anyone thinks Fiorello LaGuardia was some bleeding-heart liberal type, while he was Mayor of New York he banned pinball machines for being a corrupter of young people.

The LaGuardia Commission:
Foreward
Minor Wiki article

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Tobacco and alcohol 'are more dangerous than LSD'

Alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than many illegal drugs including the hallucinogen LSD and the dance drug ecstasy, according to a new scale for assessing the dangers posed by recreational substances.

Drug specialists say the current system for ranking drugs - class A for the most dangerous to class C for the least dangerous, as set out in the Misuse of Drugs Act - is irrational, arbitrary and "lacking in transparency".

Scientific evidence shows that heroin and cocaine are correctly ranked as class A drugs as they do cause the most harm. But LSD and ecstasy come close to bottom of the league in terms of harm caused, yet they are also labelled as class A.

Alcohol is legal and widely used but comes fifth in the "harm" table, ahead of amphetamines and cannabis, which are ranked as class B and class C respectively. Tobacco is also ranked as more harmful than cannabis.

See also:

Alcohol worse than ecstasy on shock new drug list
Scientists want new drug rankings

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This is according a source not exactly know as a purveyor of pinko-commie propaganda: the History Channel. Apparently, pot was first outlawed in Texas as means to keep Mexicans from crossing the boarder -- they would grow it in Mexico and bring it north to sell it. Beyond this, drugs weren't made outright criminal possessions by the Federal Government until the 70's. Again, according the History Channel, this may (they narrator was only speculative, but leant the impression this was the key reason) have been a tool to crack down on dissidents, because, in the minds of the powers that be, there is a direct connection between acid dropping and asking questions about authorities (perhaps with some measure of truth).

Another benefit of the War on Drugs is that it provides a rationale for violent interference in Latin American countries. This was not considered on the History Channel, however, but is well documented other places—human rights agencies are a good place to start.

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Once a egyptian Mummie was examined and there has been marihuanaseed found.
Around 1650 our famous dutch admiral De Ruyter sailed to LONDON with only 6 ships and the british fled.
Remembering the dutch saying: so poor you no smoke tobacco but ropes(made of hemp) it is obvious that they were stoned.
But if marihuan is allowed in the USA it will be controlled by Phillip Morris, Al Gore Company of whatever Big Coorporation.
That is the only problem

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I suspect that the reason behind pot prohibition as well as alcohol prohibition in the 1920's is the monopoly of oil over the fuel market. Both alcohol and hemp oil are alternative fuels. Hemp oil diesel is non-toxic, unlike carcinogenic petro-diesel. Hemp fiber after oil is removed would eliminate logging the national forests for paper.
Hemp grows well without monsanto's genetic engineering and without herbicides and pesticides.
The only faction with something to lose in cultivation of hemp is big oil and chemical corporations.
Perhaps the obvious becomes invisible after awhile, but monopolies are supposed to be illegal in America, and that should include oil's monopoly on fuel.

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All good stuff said so far, did not read the responses but I can imagine a few were from the religious right wing of this country. Drugs like pot, heroin and cocaine are addictive to the addictive personality like me for instance and thanks to AA, I am sober for today and have been for over 20 years. Of course it is a medical and pyscholgical problem but you will never see it legalized because too many people are making money, already said but necessary to make my startling comment that most of you will not believe but I invite you to do the research. The war in Afghanistan is not about terrorism, it is about heroin and heroin poppy growth that all but vanished with the rulership of the Taliban and now with our invasion the heroin poppy crop is expanding rapidly. They don't want the crop but the US government is in the drug business and they want it! Hard core drugs like cocaine (our wars in South America) and heroin (our wars in the east) are about providing money to a lot of folks and floating the stock market which is faltering right now. Pull out the drug laundering money and the stock market would bottom out.

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Pot use is a victimless crime. Medical marijuana should be legalized. A woman with cancer got prosecuted or should I say persecuted for medical marijauna prescription which most likely could have saved her life. "Legal" drugs do more harm to this society than pot. We should stop throwing people in prison for pot use.

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While attending a Senior NCO "academy" back in the 70's, a "First Sergeant" said (off the record) that he preferred marijuana smokers to alcohol drinkers because the smokers were very quiet, while the drinkers punch holes in walls and break things around the dormitories. Makes sense, eh?

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I live in California, which is one of the states, that luckily is allowing marijuana to be prescribed. I obtained a medical marijuana card, about a year ago. I had major back surgery a couple years back, and continue to have back pain daily. Marijuana is what has helped me cope with the pain I have come to endure daily. Before I started to smoke marijuana, I used multiple pain medications daily. I took Soma, Vicodin, and Aleve multiple times each day, which is hard on the liver, and made me a zombie. Now I ease my pain naturally, while still being able to function, and attend college full-time. I also have been on the dean’s list for the last year. So any stereo typing of “dumb stoner” doesn’t work here. I believe marijuana has really helped me, and could help many others.

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