Reply #51: Fine. [View All]

[Mairead]

I posted a pointer to a medical-mj literature survey that includes about 600 citations to peer-reviewed medical literature. Claiming, as Dean did, that there isn't enough science is totally without foundation in fact. There is MUCH more understanding of mj today than there was of aspirin until a few years ago, yet aspirin was the most-prescribed drug EVEN THOUGH aspirin was known to be a substance that can be fatally abused and mj is known not to be.


Unless you want to postulate that mj was made illegal as a random, motiveless act, then the only thing that makes sense is racism. Under the influence of democratisation and the collapse of class barriers secondary to the Depression, it had started to make its way from the Black and Brown communities into the White. So, to stop that, a mythology was created ('Reefer Madness') to support the criminalisation of its use. This was in the '30s, a period during which 'left' and 'right' forces were in strong conflict, and criminalisation of mj was a weapon in that conflict (as were other laws prohibiting 'race mixing' of one kind or another).