Why would alcohol be legal, while marijuana is illegal when alcohol is way worse?
Okay, marijuana is illegal because it is a dangerous drug. The extreme high it affords is from your own energy reserves, so the more of it you do, the less of a life you will have. It’s analogous to drinking your own blood for the protein — very inefficient and inadvisable. The decline of the marijuana user is slow and gradual — hard to perceive in a little time, but very obvious after a year or more. They’re alive for much less time during the day.
There are a number of reasons. Alcohol is an integral part of Western culture. It is even part of the central Christian celebration (the Eucharist). Marijuana on the other hand (e.g. hashish) is associated with the East and Islam. Islam is strictly against alcohol, just as Christian societies tend to be against cannabis (marijuana and hashish). Alcohol makes people more extrovert, in both “positive” and “negative” ways: i.e. it gives people “permission” to be more affectionate than they normally are, and equally to be more aggressive than they normally are. Consequently it “oils the wheels of commerce” as the saying is. Furthermore, alcohol “compensates” people for the sense of non-fulfillment they normally experience in their daily working lives, since they spend most of their time doing stuff they would (normally) rather not be doing. Cannabis on the other hand makes people more introverted. It does affect work-performance in a negative way, but does not bring out anything like the b
Leave it to a guy named redneck to be right on this one. The fact that the government can’t figure out how to tax it is partly the reason why they keep it illegal. Another primary reason is that they fear the wide-spread mass enlightenment which would result from marijuana being consumed openly by larger and larger percentages of the population. But I think the primary reason is that it has always been politically useful for members of the economic elite to demonize the blessed herb. When marijuana was initially made illegal during the reefer madness hysteria of the 30’s, the medicinal/hallucinogenic plant was just used as a distraction by people intent on removing industrial hemp from the economy–mainly, William Randolph Hearst, who owned great tracts of timber land and didn’t want to compete with industrial hemp. He used his newspaper empire to plant sensationalized, racist stories all over the country about how just one puff of the demon weed–hell, how EVEN BEING IN THE SAME ROOM
