Reply #15: Couldn't agree more

[Prophet 451]

Cannabis should be treated the exact same way as alcohol: Age-restricted, taxed and licensed for sale (although if you want to grow your own, go ahead) and a ban on driving under the influence but otherwise legal. Just one more adult pleasure. I actually don't smoke pot, my pleasure of choice is real ale but if my neighbour chooses to smoke a joint while I choose to enjoy a pint, does it do me any harm?

Industrial hemp has so many uses, you could virtually run an economy off the stuff (and nations have in the past). Cannabis has a record as a highly effective painkiller with minimal side-effects that stretches back over six thousand years to the dawn of human civilisation. As more research is done on the effects of cannabis, it starts to look like a panacea. Effective on numerous conditions as major as MS or cancer and as minor as insomnia. Granted, people with mental problems or a predisposition to them shouldn't take mood-altering substances of any kind but that could be said of any number of legally prescribed drugs as well (I take one of them on prescription). Pot is more effective and safer than a large proportion of legal drugs yet I am legally obliged to choose the less effective, riskier, addictive substance that (if I lived in the US) would cost me a fortune.