Also, pot-smoking is smoking. It is (and I say this in the nicest possible way, as one who supports the legalization of pot) literally a smelly habit; it affects everyone around you, even when pursued in moderation. You can't be in the same suite of rooms as someone who is smoking pot without noticing. The experience of second-hand pot is one hell of a lot better than second-hand cigarette smoke (and not just because I get to worry less about cancer or strain on my heart; it just smells better), but still not one I go out of my way to enjoy. Such a habit is easy to culturally stigmatize compared to, say, alcohol, which is orders of magnitude more dangerous than pot – in all kinds of ways that would take an hour to enumerate – but which bothers others not at all when consumed in small amounts.
Finally, there's a European cultural tradition of alcohol consumption (even excessive alcohol consumption that bothers other people!) that is alive and well in the USA. Pot, not so much. That feature is probably what made it so hard to make alcohol prohibition stick, compared to marijuana prohibition.
There's not a lot of alternatives to learning music by mimicking other musicians, and the act of extensively reading and quoting existing published works is called scholarship and is held in high regard. Quoting creative works doesn't harm the people around you; indeed, people generally enjoy well-played cover tunes, and routinely pay people to play them. And needless to say quoting stuff is a far more fundamental cultural tradition, in Europe and everywhere else, than taking any particular drug.
I don't have anything solid to back this up, but I was under the impression that in places where cannabis is legal/decriminalised/cheaper, there's an increase in oral consumption, rather than smoking (e.g. hash brownies)
I'd imagine this is partly because there's a certain element of wastage or perceived loss, and the ready availability makes it more practical. Then again, things like longer onset time and duration might turn some people off.
Oh, the many, many things I don't know about cannabis.
But speaking as an uninformed outsider – clueless, but also the target market of any mass movement – the hash brownie has the opposite problem: It's almost too inoffensive. It's famous as a way to hide marijuana from everyone, possibly including yourself. At worst, it's redolent of shame and fear, and at best it reminds people of things like pain management, which is not exactly a marketing winner.
Smoking may pose many difficulties, but it does have one big advantage: It's a group ritual that serves to advertise itself.
What cannabis needs is a recipe that suggests sophistication and good taste. Imagine if James Bond's favorite drink had had cannabis in it. Men and women of taste would be falling over themselves to blog about the superiority of original-recipe cannabis martinis. There would be tastefully lit Manhattan cannabis bars where your drink's ingredients would be fresh-clipped from live plants growing, hydroponically, in crystalline bowls suspended over each table.
I wonder if cannabis can be pleasurably served with coffee? The legalization movement needs to commission a crack research team of Dutch baristas.
The second hand effects of alcohol can also damage your health. As someone who has lived in or around nightlife districts for the last 10 years cleaning up vomit, blood and urine isn't particularly good for you. That said, I don't really care too much as it is pretty funny watching someone trying to discretely vomit in the street at 8pm.
I think society, as a whole, is becoming less tolerant of others. People get offended by the smallest things (for example, people parking crookedly) and call for laws to punish even slightly annoying behaviours. File-sharing laws have been put to the public on the annoyance factor before (that is, their file sharing is slowing down your tubes, so they must be punished).
It comes back to freedom and whether someone else acting freely limits your freedom. Unfortunately most developed nations seem to have a stronger interest in controlling people's behaviour than medieval theocracies.
The experience of second-hand pot is one hell of a lot better than second-hand cigarette smoke (and not just because I get to worry less about cancer or strain on my heart; it just smells better),
I generally (and thoroughly) agree with a lot of your points, but will note that I appear to break out in hives in reaction to second hand cannabis exposure. I don't do this with tobacco cigarettes.
Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things. Just sort of an observation that "YMMV".
Uhm, yes it does. It may take time, but in most societies, that is what eventually happens.
Only corruption and religious or political zealotry slows down the process, but eventually people will realize there's no real crime here, just a desperate reactionary attempt to maintain the status quo in a way that does more harm than good.
Corruption and religious zealotry aren't what's preventing legalization of weed. The majority of the country doesn't support it yet. The attitude of legalization advocates (I support legalization) that anyone who disagrees with them must be corrupt or in the thrall of some megachurch preacher harms the movement to legalize.
The recent California initiative is a good example of this. Rather than respecting people's reservations about legalization and finding the baby-step measure that would do the most good (e.g. keep the largest number of people out of prison or at least spare them career-destroying criminal records), California legalizers instead proposed a wish list policy that voters rejected.
There's a parallel in here somewhere with copyright legislation; it doesn't help that copyright reform advocates on the ground (ie, not Lawrence Lessig) are schizophrenic about the issue, sentimentalizing a position that reduces to virtual abolition of copyright while at the same time barking at people about GPL and working in jobs that more or less depend on copyright themselves.
