Bragr
Banned
Just blaming anything and everything on the rich and powerful is not enough, everyone is doing it without understanding what they are saying.We live in a crime ridden society due to poverty and the ever-increasing distance between the haves and the have-nots and the corruption that entails where the rich/powerful have everything or a majority portion, including influence in our leaders. Weed doesn't create criminals even remotely close to things like empty stomachs or a bad relationship.
Not everyone smokes weed because they can't control urges, that's an oversimplification/generalization. I and many others in my circle do it on occasional weekends (usually events like superbowl or holidays) and have no addiction tendencies the rest of our time. We do it to relax, socialize, and gain a moment's reprieve from paining senses that our "hell-reality" loves inflicting upon our aging biological bodies.
With that said I will say that yeah more people should practice moderation in all things.
Most poor people are not criminals, it's a lot more to the equation. Poverty is just a factor, not the root cause (it's a big cause, but still). Culture and environment are what shape people, you can take two completely different communities with the same poverty line and see huge differences. Weed has created easy entry points to being a dealer for decades, every low life got the potential to sell weed, and they have, resulting in easy access to large amounts of cash for the simplest of gangs. Of course, that's just a part of what creates a criminal, but the weed underground industry has certainly been a complete terror for societies for a long time now and made things a lot more violent because there is so much money at stake. It's not the rich and powerful that did this, but the middle class, the people who want to smoke it on the "occasional weekends".
And now we have to make it legal to deal with the repercussions of people's actions, and everyone pretends it's not themselves that did this.