I do so love it when my students are conscious and intellectual beings who seek to question the ways of the world. What follows below is a Facebook thread between Atiqah and myself.
Me: The people who don't like you just haven't taken the time to get to know you, you are harmless and charming (I'm looking at you, government officials!)- the reason why Medical and legal authorities are against Marijuana is not so because of the effects of the substance itself but more in the fact that it is statistically proven to be a gateway drug...
Atiqah: but if marijuana has an illegal status in many countries because it's a gateway drug, why don't they make tobacco and alcohol illegal too? if it's because of MONEY, then won't marijuana make them richer too? and plus, marijuana doesn't have strong negative effects to the physical being of the user, unlike alcohol and tobacco.
Me: true, ah you have opened another can of worms. Worth exploring none the least. alcohol and tobacco appeared on the scene long before people knew about the addictive effects of narcotics. By the time they knew, various big companies had already established strong lucrative industries around it. They did try to outlaw these substances in various ... See Morecountries in various times. But it always turned out a failure given the influence of the large corporations and ingenuity of the consumers.
On the point of money, you are right. But given the current attitude towards any kind of substance use or abuse, companies can't risk the baggage of adding on one more substance to their shelves. With alcohol, their jobs of maintaining a consumer health friendly product is not so bad. But with tobacco, they have been constantly fighting a scientific battle against cancer-related and heart disease studies. And they have had to constantly refine their product to make it "healthier".
Then the official reason that Marijuana is a gateway drug doesn't really apply like you said since alcohol and tobacco are also statistically proven to be gateway drugs. Perhaps the real unspoken issue is that Marijuana production has been monopolized by drug syndicates who refuse to play with and by big corporate rules.
From a medical safety point of view, that means that the Marijuana products could be tampered with cheaper substances in order to earn their producers more money.
From a more real politico-economical stance, the issue is more about being unwilling to work with and in effect make legal these drug syndicates who are third world black market power players. If Marijuana was made legal on a large scale, this would in turn render unto these third world drug syndicates the opportunity to earn legal corporate status. Trapping them in that illegal status also gives the corporation the ability to condemn Marijuana as a product and draw attention away from the more real health hazards that they sell.
Lastly, the socio-economical reason why Marijuana is frowned upon is the transient and weightless lifetsyle and ideology that it is associated with. (As you mentioned, the Rastafarian influence). This is highly incongruent with the dominant established protestant work ethic that is the life force of modern economies (and I must say, you can see this in so many Singaporeans who pride work for work's sake and count their success as human beings in material and status terms). And as you should know, the abnormal easily and often becomes the deviant.
Note: Alcohol has much the same effects as Marijuana but users over time have become more loose with the temporary mentally-debilitating effects of alcohol by terming it as a "social lubricant".
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