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geez powerclown. that's an unfortuate story---and i can see from it how you'd assume that pot was at the center how things went--and maybe it was---but it also seems like there had to be other factors at play.
i've had to watch as friends of mine spun into addiction and came by steps unravelled--the worst of that was inevitably cocaine, typically cooked down one way or another. all the symptoms you describe in your cousin i saw happening amongst these folk, directly (in that i watched it happening) or indirectly (at a remove, as it happened to someone i knew)...
i don't see weed as a gateway drug to anything else--again this for many years, knowing tons of people, thinking about them as a sample. but there are folk for whom pot is a real problem, just as there are folk for whom alcohol or almost anything else is a problem. does this have to do with pot itself? in a way, sure. but it also has to do with myriad other factors: timing, where you happen to be at in your life, what you are looking for, what you feel you lack, level of self-discipline...
is it the case that pot causes problems for enough people that it is Problematic and should remain illegal?
i don't see it.
aside: it's interesting that the op is framed as making a linkage collapse of newspapers-->reconsidering pot legislation. i thought it was going to head in an entirely different direction--like print is disappearing, no need for sustained attention, so why not?
i think the origin of pot laws comes more from some puritanical pathology, the idea that you have to confront the grimness that is your dour protestant life head on and reserve any alterations in that grimness for pleading with this god character to swoop down and fix stuff. it's as if the states is 17th century salem and everywhere in power are cotton mather replicants.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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