>I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long.

>I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address. It's entirely a generational issue in the US. People were fed decades of paranoid nonsense about marijuana from the DEA and other federal agencies, and as a result it was seen as a "dangerous narcotic" like heroin or meth. People who grew up actually using it and knowing people who use it, however, saw through that. And those people are now in power and voting.