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.