Full disclosure first: In the mid nineties I ran the Santa Cruz Cannabis Buyers Club in Santa Cruz, California. It was the second dispensary in the world. We got together with the first club in San Francisco and got Proposition 215 written and passed, the first time marijuana was legalized anywhere in the world since the 30s and the start of the current push to legalize marijuana. There are currently 29 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized cannabis in some form. Mexico and Canada will be legalizing it next year along with many other countries around the world.
As I said, the only people interested in keeping cannabis illegal are those that have a financial interest in doing so. All the people in this thread supporting keeping it illegal have ties to law enforcement. They are not interested in making more arrests for more employment. It all has to do with civil forfeiture. In this country that is a controversial legal process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing. So the cops can come into your house, confiscate anything of value and not even arrest you. That includes your house, your car, your boat or any other high ticket item. That is the reason why they sent 12 cops with automatic weapons on a simple cannabis bust. This is one of LEOs main money making schemes that is funding all those automatic weapons and SWAT teams. Trample on our rights doesn't seem to bother them at all. No wonder they want to keep it illegal, they don't want a major revenue stream cut off. And the fact that it is retire LEO supporting keeping it illegal is meaningless. Cops always support other cops no matter what. I know, I use to be a sheriff in Ventura County in the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
The lies they are telling is pathetic. Gateway drug. That is so stupid it is pathetic. Calling cannabis a gateway drug to anything is just beyond ridiculous. It is a stupid as claiming mother's milk is a gateway drug to alcohol since 99% of all alcoholics started on mother's milk.
The claim that cannabis somehow inhibits the growth of a child's brain is equally as stupid. There never has been and there never will be any studies to prove this. It is just a lie made up by the do gooders to convince people of the evils of cannabis. How evil can something be if you have to make things up to prove it is dangerous? In order to claim cannabis somehow retards brain development would require a bunch of young teenagers who had never smoked to get a brain scan, then have them smoke for a few years and then do another brain scan. That is not going to happen. Now I am not advocating that young people smoke cannabis, I am just claiming that these claims are hogwash.
As far as driving when stoned goes I personally feel someone who is stoned is a better driver than someone who is sober. I say this because during the 80s and 90s I drove 10s of thousands of miles while stoned or with someone driving who was stoned. I have never had an accident in my life. If I were flying in a private plane and the pilot wanted to share a joint with me I would gladly sit in the cockpit and share it with him. The people who have never been stoned seem to think that being stoned is somehow the same as being drunk. It is apples and oranges. The story of the guy stopping 50 feet from the light is pure fantasy made up by someone who has never been stoned.
The people who think they are protecting out children by keeping cannabis illegal are sadly misinformed. Alcohol is currently killing 88,000 people a year in the US directly, many more indirectly. Prescription drug use is a lot more than that. If these people were really worried about the health of their children they should be addressing these problems instead. Cannabis kills no one. The only real danger of using cannabis comes with the fact you might be arrested. According to the ACLU?s original analysis, marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana. Nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana.
In 1919 the moral majority made alcohol illegal and crime skyrocketed. In 1933 prohibition was repealed and the do gooders looked around for some other way to run people's lives for them. They noticed many Mexicans, blacks and jazz musicians were using cannabis so they made it illegal by running a nasty campaign and made it illegal in 1937. Then in 1971 Nixon was really pissed because the younger generation did not support his stupid war and blamed the whole opposition on drugs, hippies, the Beatles and John Lennon. Nixon commissioned the Shafer Commission to study the problem. The Shafer Commission reported back that marijuana was relatively safe and should be legalized. Nixon promptly buried that report and started the war on drugs. That war has been an absolute failure. Drug use is the same today per capita as it was in 1971. The only difference is the cops are richer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafer_Commission
The war on drugs has had no effect on drug use in this country however it has made criminals out of millions of people for using a simple plant. The total cost of the war on drugs is estimated at one trillion dollars so far. That is your tax money being wasted which is a lot more than the cost of cannabis overdoses on emergency rooms. But really the war on drugs has been a war on minorities since minorities get arrested far more often than whites do in this country.