It is still a schedule 1 drug subject to criminal federal prosecution for possession and sale. The feds are just ignoring their obligation to uphold the law.

Lots of things that are de jure illegal are de facto legal. In many US States, marijuana meets this description.

To claim "marijuana absolutely isn't legalized" is completely incorrect. Something being illegal is more complicated than what the above poster makes it seem, unless a definition of "illegality" is used that's so broad that it's meaningless.

I mean its literally at this time in the process of being downgraded to probably schedule 2 or even schedule 3 once research is ACTUALLY allowed.

Not how the law works at all. Federal law applies to interstate issues, or when local LEO requests assistance. When a state legalizes, it means directing local LEO to stop asking for that assistance. Interstate and border checkpoints absolutely still exist and DEA absolutely still pursues trafficking. Businesses in non-prohibition states buy from in-state suppliers and deal primarily in cash. The feds have no obligation to drive into these places and start flipping tables.

The fact that it’s technically illegal under federal law may be relevant in some context, but not to my specific point, which is about the effect of the law on individual behavior. As you acknowledge, the federal government isn’t enforcing the federal law. To people in states where it’s been legalized, the federal law is a legal technicality. I had to remind my Oregonian in-laws not to bring weed on the plane recently because they forgot that they’d be in federal jurisdiction passing through the airport. (Their logic was it’s legal in Oregon and legal in Maryland…)

My point is that the legal and cultural barriers that kept young adults from heading down to their local dispensary to buy dope have disappeared. So while we were on the cusp of freeing people from smoking in the 1990s, we have just made it easy and effectively legal to smoke a different thing, and everyone seems to have forgotten that inhaling smoke into your lungs is bad for you.