Ah, pot. There's so much info on the Web about
Medical Marijuana, and whether or not that's just a
Trojan Horse for the eventual legalization of
marijuana use, is it really the righteous way to proceed?
Or are we sneaking around like weasels letting the pathetically ill do our heavy lifting for us? "They need the pot! It's for them!" Yeah. It's for my mother. She's sick. It's medecine.
What about the pleasurable use of pot? What kind of narrow-minded historical squeeze are we in that we won't come out and say, "Pot is Pleasurable. Just like Wine. That's why we use it." Is it the pot that's so scary? or is it the pleasure?
I would call this a "puritanical" attitude, except that the word has been misapplied so frequently that it is heard as a synonym for "prude|killjoy|", and there is a good case to be made that the puritains were adventurers on social as well as geographic frontiers. And in fact, there is an interesting story about a council of churchmen who had forbidden sales of alcohol to the local indian tribes, but who debated and finally reversed themselves on the grounds that: alcohol gave pleasure, and was a gift from God, so they had no right denying it to their fellow man.
Well. We are so far from asserting the right to do something pleasant, like smoking pot, that we are speaking of this pleasure in medical terms, as a way to sterilize the topic enough to even mention it in public. Pleasure? Isn't that what they caught that guy doing, and it ruined his career?
How many of the congressmen (over a hundred last year used their pull to get drunken driving tickets dismissed) who drink at fundraisers would say that they were drinking because they enjoyed it?