[pmoriarty]

Politics is a strange bird, and it's really hard to predict the future. Much of the drug policy in the US is not based on science or medicine, and the US government has repeatedly ignored the advice of prestigious scientific and medical bodies and panels to soften its anti-drug stance, reschedule drugs, and treat drug addiction as a medical issue rather than a legal one.

In the meantime, some states have gone ahead and legalized medical marijuana and even recreational marijuana. This was often done by referendum, where voters got to decide, and how voters decided is a complete mystery. Did they take science in to account? Did they care about double-blind trials? Who knows? But considering the massive ignorance of science by the general public, it probably wasn't science that tipped the balance.

I suspect that if wholesale legalization of some currently illegal drugs does come, it will have little to do with science, and more to do with public perception change, and the dying off of old, rabidly anti-drug legalization opponents from another generation.

[lutusp]

All true, a high-quality comment. It's true about marijuana, and it may eventually be true about some other drugs that turn out to have beneficial uses -- in a process driven mostly by politics and public relations, very little science.