Doctors ask for change in marijuana laws...

Well, I see some people are trying to move this country into the Century of the Fruit Bat:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A large and respected association of physicians is calling on the federal government to ease its strict ban on marijuana as medicine and hasten research into the drug's therapeutic uses.

The American College of Physicians, a 124,000-member group that is the nation's largest for doctors of internal medicine, contends that the long and rancorous debate over marijuana legalization has obscured good science demonstrating the benefits and medicinal promise of cannabis.

I don't mind science as it relates to marijuana. I think we should pursue this to wherever it leads. I also believe, as a matter of public policy, marijuana should be regulated and taxed like alcohol, another recreational substance that has a low-grade medicinal value, while being more addictive than marijuana; instead of being criminalized like heroin, cocaine and LSD.

I doubt it will happen anytime soon. After spending billions and billions on this pointless and failed war on drugs and the over-hyping the dangers of pot, I don't see the field reversing anytime soon. At least on the national level. So, doomed as this effort may be, at least for now, this is terrific news because these people aren't stoners and they aren't alone:

In the 12 years since California votes approved the nation's first-ever medical marijuana law, several medical organizations - including the American Nurses Association and the American Public Health Association - have urged Congress to make cannabis a legal medicine. But the ACP is second in size only to the American Medical Association, which has about 240,000 members.

And, even the some in law enforcement think we should make some changes :

2000 Police Foundation Report suggests that certain drugs be reclassified and penalties reduced. The government rejects the recommendations.

1988 In the US, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) administrative law Judge Francis Young finds after thorough hearings that marijuana has clearly established medical use and should be reclassified as a prescriptive drug. His recommendation is ignored.

Who knows, if Obama becomes President, maybe this will all change. After all, unlike Clinton, he inhaled. But I don't bet on it. Even though I do support the change. Because, frankly, the laws are as stupid as prohibition and were racially/puritanically based.

Also, for those who don't know the history behind the banning of marijuana, it's part of an earlier cycle of Mexican-American bashing from the early 1900's:

In the early 1900s, the western states developed significant tensions
regarding the influx of Mexican-Americans. The revolution in Mexico in 1910
spilled over the border, with General Pershing's army clashing with bandit
Pancho Villa. Later in that decade, bad feelings developed between the small
farmer and the large farms that used cheaper Mexican labor. Then, the depression
came and increased tensions, as jobs and welfare resources became scarce.

One of the "differences" seized upon during this time was the fact that many Mexicans smoked marijuana and had brought the plant with them.

However, the first state law outlawing marijuana did so not because of Mexicans using the drug. Oddly enough, it was because of Mormons using it. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church was not pleased and ruled against use of the drug. Since the state of Utah automatically enshrined church doctrine into law, the first state marijuana prohibition was established in 1915. (Today, Senator Orrin Hatch serves as the prohibition arm of this heavily church-influenced state.)

Other states quickly followed suit with marijuana prohibition laws, including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927). These laws tended to be specifically targeted against the Mexican-American population.

When Montana outlawed marijuana in 1927, the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator's comment: "When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff... he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies." In Texas, a senator said on the floor of the Senate: "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy."

Of course, it wasn't just Mexicans, blacks used marijuana, the poor used marijuana, other social/racial "inferiors" used marijuana. Lead by Williams Randolph Hearst, among others, these under-classes, and their cultures, were typically demonized through the editorial pages of news media. The arguments made then were similar to many made today: dirty, diseased, lazy, dangerous.

These pernicious, racist arguments lead to many of the race-based laws we had to cast off in modern times. Laws whose goals were to keep the "savage" Black, Mexican, Asian, whomever, in place and to castrate his dangerous and licentuous culture was considered defective and dangerous to a "decent society."