The Times They Are A-Changing

" I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being in Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast."
- President Ronald Reagan

In America, modern prohibition of cannabis (and other plants/substances) began in the 1937 (with the Marihuana Tax Act) on the basis of racial prejudices and for the benefit of certain economical potentates (alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, plastics and oil industries, etc.) that considered the use of marijuana and hemp a possible obstacle to their own interests. Furthermore, many national 'agencies' that had prospered during the alcohol prohibition era, had the need to find a new "enemy", to get a new role and ever more increasing subsidies. Then since the 1960s, the anti-drug laws became a convenient excuse for controlling and persecuting the counterculture and the racial minorities...
These are the lurid, crazy and ever more obsolete roots of the current (international) cannabis prohibition, which continues to ruin lives everywhere and often assumes barbaric driftes in certain "third world" countries (Iran, Indonesia, Thailand, Tunisia etc.)
Fortunately, in most recent years, the situation is slowly but steadily changing and evolving. 24 American states (and Washington,D.C.) have legalized cannabis for medical use; Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska have also legalized its recreational use: in Uruguay the benefical plant is legal since 2014 and in Jamaica is now legal (up to 30 grams) for personal medical, spiritual and recreative use: in several parts of Spain the personal use of the plant is well accepted and many "cannabis clubs" are openly operating; in Israel the use of medical cannabis it's been  a well established reality for decades and Germany will get  it's own"medical cannabis" in2017.....
Waiting for further planetary positive changements,  users, patients and activists often gather to celebrate the healing plant and loudly reclaim new politics.
For example, in New York City, the 'green', peaceful and joyous people congregate every first saturday of every May in the Union Square Park for the "Cannabis Rally".....