Yahoo Featured Story – The Marijuana Opponents

It looks like marijuana is now mainstream. Yahoo is featuring this story today. There’s a shady alliance fighting to keep marijuana illegal. To those who study the issue of Prohibition none of the information is new. But for those with only a light acquaintance to the subject it will come as a revelation.

Led me start with the basics.

Five states, including Arizona, California, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts, will be voting to legalize recreational marijuana on November 8.

According to the latest poll, Americans overwhelmingly favor legalization.

However, there’s still some serious opposition to legal marijuana. And the funding is coming from a number of pharmaceutical companies, prison suppliers, and casino magnates.

What kind of human beings want to keep putting people in prison so they can profit? That seems immoral to me.

The article goes into more detail about the opponents and their motives. If you go to the “overwhelmingly favor legalization” link you will find out more about the proponents and their demographics. They note that while an end to Prohibition is currently favored by 60% of Americans over all, it rises to 77% among millennials (18-34 yo). That is the demographic that votes the least. As they age the political desire for an end to Prohibition will increase.

And as long as some one brought up the subject of morality (me). The NIDA has been saying since 2007 that addiction is a genetic disease. You will note that the link to the NIDA in the article no longer goes to the text in the article. Perhaps it embarrassed them. Well it should.

The NIDA says the expression of the genes involved has an environmental cause. And that is easy to figure out. Trauma. Sounds like PTSD to me. And what do you know? Every basic primer on PTSD says that chronic drug and alcohol “abuse” is a feature of some cases of PTSD.

Here are some things I’ve said before on the subject:

Dr. Lonny Shavelson found that 70% of female heroin addicts had been sexually abused in childhood. His study was of 200 “addicts”. No larger studies have ever been done even though his work was published around 2001.

We know that the genetic factor is an important component in addiction. We have known it since early 2007. Why doesn’t the NIDA trumpet this? Why isn’t more research being done? Well it hardly helps the drug war to think of it as a scheme for genetic discrimination and persecuting the tormented.