Ironic, perhaps, but not paradoxical. Anti-smoking campaigners latched onto nicotine as the principal, evil chemical and sold that narrative relentlessly for de

Ironic, perhaps, but not paradoxical. Anti-smoking campaigners latched onto nicotine as the principal, evil chemical and sold that narrative relentlessly for decades. In parallel, other campaigners sold a narrative that the only reason marijuana was prohibited was to oppress minorities. Both narratives ultimately became wildly successful and internalized by the vast majority of the population. We ended up in a logically dissonant state because that's just how politics and culture work. What's most galling, IMO, is when people today defend this obvious dissonance, such as in San Francisco where leftist politicians will defend both narratives in the same sentence with a straight face. Worse is when they do stuff like ban mentholated cigarettes with the express intention of saving the black community from itself, while opposing any proposed restraints on the sale or consumption of marijuana as oppression of the black community. There's so much dissonance there it boggles the mind. There are ways to harmonize the disparate treatment of cigarettes and marijuana in our new, normative culture so that marijuana use is afforded more laxity relative to cigarettes, but too many seem to be bought specifically into the fallacious logic of the original campaigns.