Here in Denver, we have medicinal marijuana dispensaries literally all over town. Off the top of my head, I can think of dispensaries that share parking lots with typical brick and mortar stores like Pet Smart, Target, etc. There are also a few right in the middle of downtown Denver. They're even starting to employ sign spinners that stand outside and wave a cardboard sign for $8 an hour that says "$35 8ths", etc.
Aside from the occasional completely irrational commenter on DenverPost.com, most folks around here just don't give two shits about these dispensaries. Crime rates at these shops (as well as their warehouses where they grow their product) are lower than that of banks and pharmacies. Their security and ID-checking measures are all taken very seriously, you simply never hear about them letting in underage kids or folks without medicinal permits. All of the irrational fears of "dispensaries ruining neighborhoods" or "dispensaries selling marijuana to underage kids" simply have not materialized.
In regards to your question - most of these shops are owned by "sane, enterprising individuals" and not creepy street dealers. The culture of marijuana around here is NOTHING like it was back in the midwest. There is no paranoia, fear, or any of those weird dynamics that surround marijuana in non medicinal states -- people simply don't care. Smoke it if you want, get a medicinal card if you need it, but just keep it to yourself and there will be no problems.
THIS is how we defeat the war on drugs. There are people that will say medicinal marijuana laws are just a backdoor effort for full legalization .... and they're right. With decades of brainwashing from our very own government, it's going to take time and patience to change public opinion of marijuana. The best way to do this is to regulate the production and distribution of this plant (Colorado has some of the most progressive and proactive medicinal laws in the country, much more than even California) and to slowly expose the general population to it.
Ending the war on drugs isn't going to happen over night but we are certainly beginning to move in the right direction.
Even now in the US, moneyed interests don't necessarily get everything they want --- AT&T couldn't push through the T-mobile merger, to cite a much less controversial example.
In this case, there would be money on both sides. The drug war itself is a massive industry at this point --- look at the power of prison guards in California. There are also a whole lot of politicians with a massive ego stake in the existing set of laws. And Monsanto, the tobacco companies, and agribusiness all have much easier and less stressful ways to preserve profits by lobbying. (Maintaining agricultural subsidies, for the first two, for starters.)
Swombat you have a brand here -- don't throw it away with low quality comments.
It is not very difficult to convince Monsanto if they can make more money in some other way -- it may not be something that can be solved by gcc, but when has raw computer programming talent ever been the deciding factor for a computer programmer?
If it's not very difficult to convince Monsanto of this, then please do it right away, if it has the benefit of ending the war on drugs. If you can't be bothered to do it yourself, then pray tell us the 5 easy steps to convincing Monsanto to start exploiting Marijuana and therefore decriminalise all drugs.
Unless you think, as I do, that the above is a fantasy and has no practical value as a line of action.
There is a big downside to getting it done by companies like Monsanto (or tobacco companies as mentioned in another thread below) - Insane public opposition. Drugs and their users are already perceived to be "morally bad". Club them with a company that people don't like for similar reasons and you have a solution that will never see the light of day.
Companies such as Monsanto and DuPont (not to mention a host of others) are among the ones that were glad to see hemp made illegal back in the 1930's.
Any hemp-based economy is a threat to centralized industrial concerns. With the invention of the hemp decorticator in the 1910's (the cotton gin of hemp) by George Schlichten, hemp's potential as an industrial crop to replace petroleum was unlocked.
Large, centralized industries have no interest in seeing their monopoly threatened.
You can easily dig around for more sources, but I've attached the wiki link, which has some information about fuel usage and many other uses. From what I can remember it's about as viable as biofuels from corn (maybe a bit better) but still not really production quality. Hemp's biggest advantage is the strength of it's fibers.
Anything that can be made from a hydrocarbon can be made from a carbohydrate. If hemp got the same subsidies, protections and considerations from the government that petroleum does, I suspect it would be cheaper than petroleum in the long run.
A lot of the biggest opposition to pot legalization measures is the pharma industry (#1 lobbyers in the US, in terms of money spent). In many ways marijuana is a better alternative than prescription pills for pain and other medical treatment.
Let major tobacco companies expect that if drugs were legalized, they could expand their business. They may start lobbing in favor of legalization right away.
Portugal is hardly the beacon of education and knowledge of the world, and yet they managed it. This is not a solution, it's giving up and saying "let's wait for it to happen by itself".
Exactly how is educating people and giving them facts "giving up"? Equipping people to make rational decisions based on evidence and giving them the confidence to make changes - that's a slow process.
There seems to be a trend for humans becoming brighter and more socially connected. (See Pinker's decline of violence work.)
I'm making the assumption that those trends will also stamp out boneheadedness with regards to prohibition.
Various primitive gods/spirits probably fitted the available facts pretty well at some point.
The educated middle class is perhaps outnumbered, but holds much power (ha like iOS vs Android) in that most teachers are educated middle class. And at least in the UK, teachers seem to be mostly areligious.
Here's an interesting question: what would end the war on drugs? Is it something that can be made to happen by sane, enterprising individuals?