It seems to me that part of the problem in current US society is the continuing pathologizing of every human condition. In years past (I grew up in the sixties) people who smoked pot did so for the pure enjoyment of it. Everybody knew that it was illegal and could land you in jail, but that actually made it more fun to beat the system. There was no sense that there was anything clinically wrong with the people who smoked dope. If they did it a lot, it was called a bad habit.

Fast forward to 2019. The first attempts to legalize/normalize the use of marijuana involved medical use. This required that anyone who got a prescription had to have a condition diagnosed by a professional. Suddenly, all those people who had smoked for fun for years, now have a medical condition, and have become those pitiable individuals who must have the pot because of a condition they suffer from. With the rise of legal recreational marijuana, I expect an explosion of use, with all the attendant problems, just as we saw with alcohol in 1600's Europe. Whenever a drug becomes widely available at reasonable cost, it seems that people will use it to excess until some social controls are in place.

Wayne