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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

The US is not lagging behind. When it comes to marijuana liberalisation, it is definitely leading the way. With the exception of Netherlands, attitudes to marijuana is pretty strict in Europe. The US has the most pot smokers/capita by a long shot.

Also, Hollywood movies seem to portray it as some cool party drug, that hippies and pseudo-intellectuals use. The drug is present in most American Pie-style movies, many sitcoms and animated series like Family Guy.

Personally I believe marijuana going mainstream is an engineered phenomena. Hollywood is able to create perceptions and demands where none was before. Older generations weren't miserable all the time because they couldn't smoke pot. New generations found out about it by the marketing.

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I don't necessarily disagree with your post but you should be careful with generalizations that aren't backed up with evidence. "The US has the most pot smokers/capita by a long shot" sounds a lot like some assumption you just made up based on your own personal experience. A study like marijuana users per capita is inherently difficult because people don't like admitting that they partake in illegal activity. The only statistic to go on for that study is how many people were arrested for marijuana crimes, which only shows how many people were caught breaking a law, not how many people use.

Also I think your marijuana/drug law knowledge is a little behind. There are a number of countries in Europe and elsewhere who are changing to more relaxed drug policies similar to the progress in the US (including Portugal who effectively decriminalized all drugs in 2001).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_lifetime_cannabis_use_by_... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_cannabis_use_by_country.

Laws may be more lax in Europe but popular opinion of the drug is much more negative than in the US. But attitudes are changing largely due to how it is portrayed by Hollywood.

The "how many arrested" statistic is completely useless because the level to which marijuana possession results in arrest varies wildly between countries and even states or cities. Equally the frequency of searches, the criteria for selecting people to search all vary wildly.

Anecdotally, marijuana usage was much more prevalent amongst students I knew when I lived in Canada than it is in the UK. My experience (admittedly while travelling through) in the US was similar to Canada. This drug-use map[1] corroborates that (US 14%, Canada 12%, UK ~7%), although I do agree that any survey about drug use will probably not see completely truthful answers.

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2012/ju...

Portugal is also ahead of us - they have decriminalized all drugs. Their attitude towards drug abuse is that it needs to be treated instead of punished. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...

What an insightful idea - HELP people instead of just locking them up in timeout only to release them back into the public with the same (or worse) problems that they started with.

Older generations could, in fact, smoke whatever the hell they wanted: large-scale criminalization of cannabis started in the 1960s in the US. In Europe, even heroin was legal during most of the XIX century!

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