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I looked up some information about your statement. Having never used it myself, I speak only from talking to others and from research. Found some interesting facts to support your text:

Why is marijuana illegal

From reading a couple articles (including the linked one above, it appears that there was a perfect storm of 'enemies' to the use of the plant including:

• -Incidents of poisoning from individuals that laced the drug with other substances
• -North / South rivalry (Prohibition hurt the south and forced other alternatives)
• -Competition and propoganda by Alcohol industry
• -Prejudice against certain groups who were more frequent users (Mexican and African Americans)
• -Overall "prohibition" attitude that believed society could be whitewashed by laws to fix various societal issues.

Not only did opinion turn against the plant in the early 20th century, but it actually turned opposite of the historical stance. There was a point in certain colonies that people were punished if they did not grow the plant.

Most people would agree that this is not a "poison" as some see it. They would also acknowledge that classifying meth as less dangerous than pot can't be attributed to science in any way. Clearly, the schedule system imposed by the FDA and DEA is flawed and influenced by politics. Even for someone who feels it should be banned, they could at least be intellectually honest enough to say their ranking of pot as more dangerous than meth is flawed.

But on the other hand, the drug war is big business right now. According to the Bureau of Justice, drug offenses account for about a quarter of all reasons for incarceration. Not only that, but 1 in 8 state employees in the country are employees of a corrections agency.

It seems to me that there are a lot of people with a vested interest in not reexamining the issue and in keeping the status quo. Obviously, people have important concerns about health and what you put in your body. I just wish we could focus on more facts and less politics so people could make the decisions based on more than just waves of political opinion.

http://www.drugwarrant.com/art...

Cite your sources too.

we already have alternates to booze and it's called Marijuana. But because it's not physically addictive and doesn't cause horrible health effects

Warning to reader: your milage may vary depending on where you live

What we're talking about now with these assassinations is much more like the police showing up at someone's home, breaking the door down, and shooting them because the DA says they were responsible for a bank robbery earlier in the week. That's not really how it's supposed to be done, and the risks to innocent citiznes in such cases due to ignorance, mistakes, or malicious official acts is much higher.

No-knock warrants have been standard procedure for over a decade now, and average 70,000 (Yes seventy thousand) per year lately, up from 2000 per year just a decade ago.
Most of these raids cause the death of at least one innocent person, and a frightening number of them causing the death of the entire family that lives there. Only a very tiny handful actually went forward in a court of law to offer any evidence what so ever that the person murdered in such a raid was actually guilty of any crimes. Not to mention being dead makes it a little bit hard to fight any such charges, but that's another issue all together.

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
http://apainfultruth.com/the-issues/no-knock-warrants/

There need to be checks and balances around such enormous power to protect innocent people.

That boat has sailed long ago. Not only is this form of murder out and out legal, but it is argued for by idiots to this very day - idiots who don't realize they are only one ink smudge away from being murdered along with their family using these tactics.

Apologies for posting anon, I understand if you take this less seriously because of it (I likely would too) - But please search for and read up on "no knock warrant" and "no knock raids gone wrong"

I just read an article about a young woman whose only crime was that she gave her boy-friend's Mother a ride to a house. The older woman went in unbeknownst to the girl for crack cocaine and was busted inside the house by an undercover officer. The girl received a mandatory 12 year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. She had no criminal record, was in the top 2% of her High School Class, volunteered public service regularly and had multiple scholarships for college. Even the Judge who presided over the case called it a grotesque miscarriage of justice and that these "hard on crime laws" with mandatory sentences that don't provide judicial discretion are stuffing the prisons with innocent people.

There are still people in Texas doing a life sentence for a gram of hash. Read this article to find out about some of the most ludicrous prosecutions that portray a gross disregard for people that has become commonplace in certain regions of the United States. There are many people in prison whose only crime is possession. The prosecution of poorer Americans (which means disproportionately people of color), has become a conveyor belt that is prison bound. The war on crime has created a legal assembly line with millions now serve (3 in 4 people in prison today are there as a result of the war on crime.) The police sandbag those they arrest to assure a prison sentence. Heaping felonies on a defendant, the defendant is then forced to choose a plea bargain for 10 years while facing 110 years worth of charges. Public defense is barely better than no defense at all. So innocent and guilty alike are shoveled into prison like human refuse. The war on drug has imploded the criminal justice system, and turned it into a revolving door that feeds people indiscriminately in, and to abate prison overcrowding lets others out, then again you have those states that have now turned their privatized prisons into labor camps, and the vary companies that provide prisons have lobbied for longer and harsher sentences because its good for their bottom line.

There is abundant information talking about the disproportionate prosecution of people of color for drug related crimes. You could read this article or this scholarly article. Before you comment on this, please bother to get at least basically informed on the subject. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark... er America.

Finally, the fact that you don't know about the corporate connections to Marijuana becoming illegal in the first place and remaining so currently just emphasizes that you haven't done your homework. You can go here to read this article to find out how an over ambitious Federal Agent and William Randolph Hearst worked together to demonize hemp in the first place. Today Big Pharma spends millions to keep Pot illegal because they don't want competition for their prescription analgesics, synthetic opiates, anti-nauseals, appetite enhancers, mood elevators and anti-carcinogenic drugs, and there's no money on a natural substance you can't patent. If it sucks today and involves more than 3 people, I can follow the money back to a lawyer, a politician and a corporation or a religious fanatic. That is the sad state of American in the twenty first century. Wake Up

You are missing the point about throwing grenades into the homes of people who committed no crime, then busting down their door and shooting them. This happens all over the country:

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

The SWAT teams and drug squads who kill people generally receive no punishment for their actions, even when they kill innocent people. These are not actions that benefit society -- these are people who committed no crime and posed no danger, who were killed by paramilitary police squads.

Thanks, Thing 1!

Related posts by you as replies by stuff I wrote, just looking at them again, most relating to post-scarcity and abundance and singularity topics:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34977060
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34979994
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34990484
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=35001526
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=35001540
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2719093&cid=39319235

I could believe that last one! :-)
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/
"Hearst and Anslinger were then supported by Dupont chemical company and various pharmaceutical companies in the effort to outlaw cannabis. Dupont had patented nylon, and wanted hemp removed as competition. The pharmaceutical companies could neither identify nor standardize cannabis dosages, and besides, with cannabis, folks could grow their own medicine and not have to purchase it from large companies."

So, if true, once again, artificial scarcity, backed up by legal means...

See also (although different drugs work by different methods):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

And yet, the perennial problem of the "pleasure trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

"We're keeping you from accessing these websites because they say we are corrupt assholes."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks

the US is also hypocritical on this matter, but for right now I feel we're not in the same league as, say, Syria.

Does the US order soldiers to open fire on protesters? No, of course not, we prefer to have our paramilitary police enter homes in the early hours of the morning and shoot people:

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

Here is the point where you say, "But that is still different, because those people died due to government mistakes!" At the end of the day, however, people were killed by militarized government agents.

More like, "The same group of rights-hating cops who fly helicopters over my house looking for marijuana now want to fly quieter, cheaper drones." Anything that makes violations of our civil rights -- a category which should include the war on drugs as a whole -- easier, cheaper, or in any way more efficient is a bad thing. Constitutional protections have done little to protect people from being charged with drug law violations over feral hemp growing on their land:

http://www.myabc50.com/news/local/story/Attorney-argues-Lisbon-mans-pot-crop-was-actually/O0ZqB3dQhEOVy4uSFyh9dQ.cspx

Or worse still, being killed for no reason at all:

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

If only the paramilitary drug squads were not killing people:

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

That is why I wrote, "Arrest or kill" -- sometimes they have enough restraint not to use their assault rifles, and then other times they lack that restraint and wind up killing bystanders, children, and their targets.

Just wait until they use this on a vehicle that still has a human being still inside it when they turn on their death/maim ray.

They really want to open themselves up to that kind of liability?

There won't be any liability. Just more "victims of the terrorists."

Our police force kill three to four hundred innocent people every year using military tactics, and not a single punishment gets handed down. It's all filed away as officially legal.

Here is the perfectly legal murder of a 7 year old girl
How about all of a 44 year old, 16 year old, two 18 year olds, and an 8 year old
Maybe just a list of 40 some odd innocent victims murdered by police.

Each of those police officers are still employed. No laws broken. No charges filed.

No, anyone made sick or killed by this scanner will be standard-operating-procedure. There will be no liability even if every last person at the super bowl dropped over dead from it.

You're probably thinking of William Randolph Hearst and the disinformation campaign that used racist (particularly anti-Mexican and anti-Black) rhetoric. A number of Christian groups jumped on the bandwagon to justify their prejudices as a moral issue rather than a racial issue. According to this account there were many different motives and little fair play involved.

Are you lost sir?

The United States has the DEA enforcing it's domestic drug policy throughout the world.

Here in Canada:
http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/articles/3261.html

Abroad, Cocaine is tolerated and seen as a great resource in South America yet America is killing civilians to thwart a domestic problem?????? A problem that stems from lack of Education, Health care and Poverty

Missionary plane shot down in Peru: collateral damage in US "drug war
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/apr2001/peru-a24.shtml
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/peru_coverup.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/04/video-of-missionaries-bei_n_449074.html

DEA agents shoot innocent 14-year-old girl in the head, but deny any wrongdoing.
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/2998.html

http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/license-to-kill.html

DEA GO AWAY!!!
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

Lets not forget Marc Emery a Canadian politician extradited because of his influence on the pro marijuana movement. He was extradited for selling seeds (which is legal in Canada) via mail to the U.S. unprecedented enforcement of American pollution on Canadian Sovereignty.

Already happens: http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

It kind of sucks for that guy, but basically if you don't like laws, you'll usually be better off trying to change them than run away.

Sounds great... until you realize how some incredibly unjust laws are the result of a racist billionaire's self-serving propaganda campaign , and even the president laughs off the wishes of the people!

How can one win such a battle? The game is loaded so that freedom is not allowed to win.

I'm not religious, but I have to quote Saint Augustine here: "An unjust law is no law at all."

Here you go...

• Why is Marijuana Illegal? - A brief history of the criminalization of cannabis
• The Union: The business behind getting high.

Gee, wonder why the fucking Constitution was written on HEMP paper...

The US Government has such bullshit hypocrisy on this "War On Drugs": Hemp For Victory

--
ALL Law is based on Contract Law.