Is there no progression in politics, but only transferences?

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But what happens if people on your own political side are also doing the drugs though and also being jailed? Wouldn't that be like shooting yourself in the foot?

The simplest answer is, if they're normal everyday people, the government doesn't care. They're expendable. If they're important people, then the police know who they are, and to leave them alone.

Trump shoots himself in the foot all the time….yet, like Humpty Dumpty, he pops right up again every time.

You couldn’t obtain cannabis or use cannabis for recreational use, even in the 30s. People got jail sentences for possessing small amounts of cannabis even in the 90s.

The 90's are after the 70's...

From the 30's to the 70's, while not legal for "recreational" use, it was legal for medical use, not unlike cocaine and opium. Opium is still available today, with a prescription. Approved for children as young as 11 by the FDA.

Now, much like prohibition, where alcohol was illegal for recreation, it was still legal for medical use. All you had to do was slip your doctor a few bills and he'd "prescribe" you some. "For muh nerves". Same with cannabis. You went and got a "prescription". This is exactly why when states legalized medial use for cannabis more recently, people already knew the trick to play.

Well I just don't understand how cannabis was made illegal to attack minority groups when white people use it too. Whenever a white person I know uses cannabis, no one ever comments by saying "that's so non-white of you" or something along those lines.

Well, now you've changed a word. We've gone from "political opponents" to "minorities". And it is possible to be white AND a minority, just like it's possible to belong to more than one minority. White and gay. White and disabled. White and poor. Black gay disabled and poor. It's not an all-or-nothing situation. And members of a race can also be a political opponent, if they are a target of political action. In the Filipines, being white makes you a minority.

The world is more complex than you realize, and a lot of it is relative.

Selective policing comes into play. Catch a white person doing it, give them a warning. Catch a black person doing it, throw the book at them. Cannabis isn't meant to be associated with one race or another (though some bigots do), it's just meant to be the excuse to act against people you disapprove of, whomever they are. Nixon used it against white people as well as POC. Not cos of race, but cos they were war protesters. And if you need to, one can always selectively apply the law. Some people get warnings, and some people get prison, for the exact same "crime".

Oh okay, sorry. I misunderstood.

Not a problem. Misunderstandings happen, nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes political progress is additive, in ways that advance everyone, or at least everyone from a group, without "taking from others" to do so. Other forms of social progress do "simply transfer" certain resources - but those usually pertain to matters of finite resources, like money, or labor.

An example.

On the one hand, there's topics like gay marriage. It's not like there's a cap to the number of married couples that can exist, other than the total number of people that can exist in pairs. It's not like Adam and Steve getting married somehow makes it impossible now for Edith and Abner to get married, too. The existence of a gay or lesbian couple may reduce the total number of straight couples that could be formed, but it doesn't actually prevent any of those couples from getting married. It's not a zero-sum situation where a gay wedding steals it's spot from a straight wedding. Both can still happen.

OTOH, there's something like slavery. Not even american history slavery. Slavery in general. Just the simple idea that someone forces some else to work. Well, if you end slavery, and the slave no longer wants to work for you for free, someone else is going to have to do that work to get it done, or you're going to have to pay them, or someone else, to do it. In either case, yes, there is a transference. Either a transference of who does the work, or a transference of money in the form of payment in return for labor. Boss has less money and worker has more money, cos boss actually had to pay them for once, cos no longer a slave. The transference corrected an imbalance.

Sometimes you can balance the scale of fairness just by adding weight to one side or the other. Other times, it is necessary to balance things by moving the weight from one side to the other.

I highly doubt this.

I'd say the 1930s-1970s was the toughest time to get "legal" medical marijuana. In the US, marijuana became an unlawful and controlled substance in the 1930s. Though this legislation targeted recreational users, an unintended side effect was medical practitioners not being able to easily obtain marijuana. The sale of any marijuana was highly controlled and taxed heavily, making the legal supply next to nil. The Boggs Act of the early 1950s, signed by Truman, made possession of marijuana a federal crime, with mandatory jail time and/or fines.

Why do you claim marijuana was readily available medicinally during this time?

"Doubt" is a funny thing. A military commander once doubted the effective range of enemy muskets. He boldly stood up to address his men and tell them not to worry. "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-" were his last words, before he got shot in the head.

I didn't say "readily obtainable". I said "legally obtainable". From what I understand, by 1918, the US Gov themselves were growing 60,000 lbs per year. "Controlled and taxed" matter very little to the supply when the government is the supplier. In 1968, University of Mississippi became the official grower of cannabis, for the US government. See? In the 60's, even the Government was doing weed in college.

Even up to the 1970's and later, it was still approved for treatment of glaucoma and other specific ailments. As for the Boggs act, that mostly added minimum sentences for first time offenses, with a quick mention of cannabis. It was an amendment to the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act of 1922, which outlawed certain substances, except for medical use. Boggs' amendment simply added minimum penalties for the illegal possession, etc - medical possession was still not illegal.

Additionally, something can be illegal, but if it's not actually policed, then it's a fangless law. Nixon was still the one to really hammer down in it.

Back then, they didn't have internets or google earth. There was no system to instantly verify whether you did in fact have a legal prescription, or even the ailment you claimed you did. There was no way to find a hidden weed farm hidden out in the fields of nowhere, without an insane amount of legwork. People got away with a lot.

Some had legal prescriptions for actual medical problems, and bought it legally. Some paid for prescriptions (illegal) but bought it "legally" with a technically illegal prescription. Some had no prescription, and bought it illegally. Medical stuff came from gov't growers. Illegal stuff came from bootleg growers. Possibly some leaked government stuff, too. But it was really hard to tell which was which. Despite the laws, a lot of people also didn't really care. Until Nixon declared "war on drugs".

Nixon was the first to go after medicinal users as well. A few cases came to court, and the court decided that a treatment deemed medically necessary could not be denied as treatment to someone who had already been receiving it, even if it were to later be outlawed. Hence the exceptions for glaucoma and cancer, but that's about it. Where as pre-Nixon, you could get it for a variety of medical reasons, and doing so wasn't overly difficult, as long as you had the means (money).

Seems to me like the hardest time to get it, medically or otherwise, was from the 70's to the mid 00's. In that period, you had to be nearly blind from glaucoma, or nearly dead from cancer, for the most part. Pre 70's, it was still regulated, but not with that much of a stranglehold.

Those would be a few of the reasons I would make the claims I have.

Okay...

Sounds like you're implying it was common place and very easy for the average Joe to obtain marijuana from pedestrian doctors, and that doctors could easily get marijuana to prescribe or that pharmcies readily had marijana in-stock. None of these things were true.

Of course the government keeps it's own stash and supply of illicit drugs, like when they did those LSD experiments in the 1950s. Doesn't necessarily mean they made it readily available or conveniently accessible to civilian doctors.

The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 required all medical practitioners to keep detailed lists of anyone to whom they prescribed marijuana for at least two years. The government was trying to dissuade marijuana availability to the public and made doctors jump through hoops to get it. Even if it was legal on paper for medical purposes, it doesn't mean it was easy and convenient for doctors and pharmacists to obtain. If the people who control the supply (the government) don't want to sell it to you, you're SOL.

Oh okay. So when people say Nixon was the fault of Cannabis being illegal, I am not going to count that, if it was still next to impossible to get before him, compared to today.