Interesting you mention the priest of herbs, as Andrew Weil is. However, I think that there has been a noticeable shift in the good doctors pronouncements of the herb. Yes, he is very much on board the state's monopoly of medical marijuana. Obviously, Dr. Weil has not been immune to the political climate surrounding any discussions around the cannabis plant. I would have, in the very least, expected him to have remained a disinterested party. The medical marijuana lobby has a good lap dog in Dr. Weil, as his credentials speak for themselves; he would do well before any government-bureaucratic committee as a mouthpiece of legalize and medicalize lobby.
Such a boondaggle, this appeal to the state to "give" us our right to ingest! The Constitution never had to expressly mention the inalienable right to ingest drugs; it was already communicated in the right to property...of my person! Moreover, the Founding Father's never would have conceived of the scope and degree that medicine would play in the political and social scheme of things; but here it is, manifest and writ large in the war on drugs. What serves as good, it often turns out, becomes the greatest evil.
The slow erosion of our right to our person, and of a free market of all drugs, is now merely a historical blip, so it seems. On this, the slow progression of the state into our private lives, its incursions into our very bodies, was not effected in one fell swoop; just as a frog is said to boil alive if the heat rises slowly enough. I think the water is at a boiling roar, now.
