If pot is the biggest cash crop, shouldn't it be legal?

I read it and it is based on the fallacy that has overcome America lately.

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. Every scholar and every reporter should have that statement tattooed on the inside of his eyelids. It will reduce by about 90% the volume of crap like this that is routinely published and then parroted about in America. (And apparently Australia. Some aspects of our culture should not be exported.)

What idiot believes that if one twin chooses to smoke marijuana and the other does not, the only difference between them is the effect of the marijuana use? Why did one choose and the other did not? Does no one but me think this is a really intriguing question? But an even more intriguing--and far more important--question is why did not a single one of these idiots ask it before I did? Much less before they published this so-called "study"?

What was going on in these two kids' lives that led one to try a popular recreational drug and the other not to? Different friends? Different life-affirming experiences? No two children are treated alike by their parents, not even twins. If one gets more attention, will he feel stronger and not need drugs? Or will he feel invulnerable and assume he can safely take the risk? I'm not even a sociologist and these questions popped into my mind faster than I can type! If I were a sociologist (goddess help you all, I'd probably be banned by now for excessive pontification) I'd have a list of questions so long it would rival the Iraq report.

Someone brought up the well-known point (you people need to get off of this website more often if this argument is so new to you) that if you've been lied to throughout school by reprehensible wastages of our tax money like the D.A.R.E. program, you will begin to distrust all authority. The fact that marijana is illegal--and by golly so are heroin and methamphetamine and roofies and PCP--means that the scumbag authorities have probably been lying to you about all that stuff. The "gateway" position of marijuana is at least partially an effect of the illegality itself. For those who do not take the litmus-test libertarian position that all drugs must be legal because the Constitution does not grant the government the power to make them illegal, this should be enough to get you to start lobbying for decriminalization of at least marijuana.

Another aspect of illegality is the fact that everyone who buys marijuana and/or smokes it suddenly has transformed himself into a criminal. Once you think of yourself as a criminal, it will generally affect the way you see the world. Your whole paradigm of right and wrong has been upset. Couple that shuddering of your principles with the fact that the guy who sold you the pot also sells meth, coke, and everything else, and you've got convenience side-by-side with an ethical dilemma. If you bought your marijuana legally in the liquor store the only more dangerous drug that you might be considering moving "up" to would be Jack Daniels.

Then there's the more recent impact of illegality: drug testing. Marijuana has always been difficult to get away with because it's bulky and smelly. Pick up half an ounce on your way to work and leave it in your glove compartment on a hot day, then invite your boss to ride to lunch in your car... Now they can find THC in your urine a month after you smoked it once. This is a powerful inducement to try something that is just as illegal but less likely to lose a job opportunity.

Remember that over the last thirty years science has been popularized, politicized, and corporatized. It's hard to do research on drugs (or anything else for that matter) without the press, the government, or the pharmaceutical industry looking over your shoulder and offering you a grant contingent on you proving them right.

If you want a more objective view, the bible on drugs is still "The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs." Even Consumers Union caved in to the political pressure and hasn't issued an updated edition in thirty years. So you won't find the newer chemistry-set drugs in there. But the research is sounder than anything that has been done since, and as always C.U.'s goal was to inform people, not to influence them. There may have been some decent research done on drugs since then but there's almost no way to separate it from the crap like the report cited here, which won't stand up to ten seconds of peer review by someone who isn't even a peer but was educated back in the days when you had to be able to think to earn a bachelor's degree in anything.

Sorry guys, but this really is a piece of crap. Correlation does not imply causation. Not even in the distractingly, adorably cute situation of twins. (Thank the goddess they weren't able to do it with puppies or you fools would all be out there shooting drug dealers.) Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Please repeat that one hundred times before you hit the "enter" button again.