"I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address."
Many people are deathly afraid of illegal drugs, including marijuana.
It may seem to some people today that marijuana is "obviously harmless" or much less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, but that view has only relatively recently become at all widespread. Remember fear-mongering films like Reefer Madness, government anti-drug propaganda ("Just Say No" campaign, "DARE", etc), media sensationalism, politicians equating drug use with crime, and so on -- these things really got people in to an anti-drug frenzy, and marijuana was just one of many drugs in the firing line.
Such moral panic is far from over. It's still going strong against the boogyman drugs of the day: meth and heroin (or the so-called "opiod epidemic"). If you get riled up about the dangers of those drugs, you can perhaps understand how some people used to feel (and still do) about marijuana (and about alcohol, for that matter, which was also prohibited at one point before becoming legal).
The difference between cannabis and every other drug is that there are 0 reported deaths, making the arguments related to physical harm far more questionable than those that appear in the current moral panic over frequent opioid deaths which are obviously harmful.
Many people are deathly afraid of illegal drugs, including marijuana.
It may seem to some people today that marijuana is "obviously harmless" or much less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, but that view has only relatively recently become at all widespread. Remember fear-mongering films like Reefer Madness, government anti-drug propaganda ("Just Say No" campaign, "DARE", etc), media sensationalism, politicians equating drug use with crime, and so on -- these things really got people in to an anti-drug frenzy, and marijuana was just one of many drugs in the firing line.
Such moral panic is far from over. It's still going strong against the boogyman drugs of the day: meth and heroin (or the so-called "opiod epidemic"). If you get riled up about the dangers of those drugs, you can perhaps understand how some people used to feel (and still do) about marijuana (and about alcohol, for that matter, which was also prohibited at one point before becoming legal).