In response to your editorial (“Good Medicine,” SN 5/17), I would like to point out that cannabis has no lethal dose and its pharmacological effects have never caused a single death in more than 5,000 years of recorded history.

The (unseen) driving force against medical (or unrestricted adult) legalization of cannabis is that cannabis can’t be patented. This precludes the need for big business to be involved and that fact makes cannabis commercially unattractive to the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries and their lobbying power. It seems that if it can’t profit successfully the government can’t justify legalization, even for the sick and dying.

Furthermore, the war on cannabis drives the war on drugs. Without cannabis prohibition, the drug war would be reduced to a pillow fight. This is the politics and the economics of cannabis prohibition.

Maybe the corrupt politicians and media are required to adhere to the party line of cannabis prohibition because law enforcement, customs, the prison and military industrial complex, the drug testing industry, the “drug treatment” industry, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, politicians themselves, et al, can’t live without the budget justification - not to mention the invisible profits, bribery, corruption and forfeiture benefits that prohibition affords them.

The drug war also promotes, justifies and perpetuates racist enforcement policies and is diminishing many freedoms and liberties that are supposed to be inalienable according to the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Myron Von Hollingsworth
Fort Worth, Texas, resident