I think we should view alcohol and cannabis very similarly. Both are potentially addictive and both can seriously harm a person’s life and family.
Both require us to address the same question: how do we handle addictive substances in society?
If made legal, then how do we navigate the normalization of a substance which can quite literally ruin a life? It prohibited, how do you manage the safety concerns and crime we know will stem from the ceaseless demand for drugs which are unregulated? How do we manage education in either case?
In this sense, alcohol and cannabis are the same thing with the same problems attached.
I believe you underestimate peoples ability to ruin their own lives, regardless of what laws and regulations are put into place to try to help them.
Many people kill themselves with food, legal drugs to name a few.
We’ll be in a much better place if more people become knowledgeable in the workings of their own minds, bodies and emotions so that seeking self-destruction is less common.
People drink and eat and smoke because they’re hurting and seeking distraction and numbness. There are some anomalies where people fall into addiction more easily, but stronger family and community safety nets seem like a far better insurance against the potential outcomes of this than virtually anything else.
Pretty much every heavy cannabis user, alcoholic, or other addict I’ve met has had deep family issues. It starts early. Regulations and education might make a dent in outcomes, but the only way we’ll have happy people who don’t want to ruin themselves is to make it so they aren’t crushed under the misery and fear of taking on the world in the first place.
I guess you could find it here and there earlier than that, but it was quite rare.
> In my (European) country [...]
Your country, and even Europe as a whole, is not the same thing as humanity.
Documented pharmacological uses seems to be at least since 2,800 BC [0], cultivation seems to be at least another 5,000 years or so before that.
[0] https://www.sydney.edu.au/lambert/medicinal-cannabis/history...
What a strange thing to say, when the previous commenter wasn't saying the opposite. They were citing when weed became legal, socially accepted, and permeating of their culture, which is the topic.
Edit: As an aside, this whole discussion began with on the topic of prohibition in regard to alcohol, which for a lot of people that term specifically refers to a period in the United States during the 1920s-1933. I’m not sure if the colonel was referring to a different European prohibition or how the rise in ubiquity of cannabis in the 90s has to do with their initial point, if at all.
For my point it's irrelevant if people used cannabis thousands of years ago and then stopped.
My point is that weed had no presence in culture or social acceptance pre-1990. Weed is therefore much easier to ban than alcohol and not comparable to the difficulty of banning alcohol.
I don't know the history of weed in US, but my guess is that it's roughly similar.