Medical marijuana is just a backward strategy to get recreational marijuana legalised. It’s like the potheads twenty years ago who would praise hemp’s excellent properties as a fibre and fuel source. They didn’t care about any other fibre crops. It was a transparent ruse.
A medical intervention’s legality should be pushed by worldwide medical consensus, not by a regional cultural predisposition to enjoy the compound’s recreational use. Medical marijuana is a non-issue in European medicine.
That said, I believe the enormous public money put into the customs, legal and punitive systems to combat marijuana is pretty much thrown into the sea. A society with legal hard liquor will not have much comparative trouble with legal cannabis. Legalise it, tax it and put the money into alcoholism prevention & rehabilitation, I say.
So, USA: your medical marijuana policies are kind of childish. You’re transparently not promoting them because of any greater medical insight than the rest of the world has. You’re promoting them because you have a century-long solid cultural tradition to smoke weed recreationally. Just own it, OK?
This outburst was inspired by the current episode of the excellent Planet Money podcast from NPR.