From the Club des Hachichins in 1840s Paris where the literary lights of France gathered, to the jazz loving vipers of America in the 1920s and 1930s and the hippies congregating on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1960s San Francisco marijuana has often exerted a profound effect on popular culture.

According to Adam Tschorn writing in in the Los Angeles Times we are now in a period where marijuana’s cultural influence is ascendant. He argues that, “after decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.”

While this article is accurate, it is also incomplete. There is, like almost all articles about marijuana, no mention of the fact that numerous commissions, investigations and studies such as the Nixon appointed Shafer Commission and the Canadian Senate report have consistently found that there is no valid reason for marijuana to be illegal in the first place.

Cross posted on The Trebach Report