Big dope: how marijuana benefited from one of the slickest PR campaigns in history | Spectator USA

Big dope: how marijuana benefited from one of the slickest PR campaigns in history | Spectator USA

• The effects on many of its users are permanent. They may give it up, but the damage has been done

When Jared Loughner shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head, on January 8, 2011, an appalled America sought some sort of reason for this cruel action, and for some remedy. Giffords, though gravely hurt, survived.
But in a brief and terrible frenzy in the parking lot of a suburban Tucson supermarket, Loughner killed six people and wounded several others.
When post-arrest pictures were released, showing him smirking and vague, I had little doubt what I was seeing.
It did not take long to find out that my suspicions — that he was a user of mind-altering drugs — were justified.
But in all the years since, this aspect of his past has been noted but not in any way acted upon.
...This kind of individual madness was rare before 1960.
Why is there now so much of it? 
...There’s a simple reason for this.
Marijuana has been the beneficiary of one of the slickest, most sustained advertising campaigns in human history.
Not only do millions believe it is some sort of medicine. 
Most people, even law enforcers, describe it as a ‘soft’ drug.
This is an absurdity.
Lifelong mental illness is not a ‘soft’ outcome.
So, even when its use is clearly linked with mental illness and terrible crime, nobody even asks if it might be to blame..."
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