Back in the good old 1930s, when radio and talking movies were the rage, few Americans thought to question the voices of authority which issued sanctimonious pronouncements in stentorian tones. "Marihuana" was addictive and dangerous! And all of our youth were at risk to dope peddlers in schoolyards!

What the authorities wanted most of all was to drum up public support for federal legislation to "stamp out this scourge." A massive propaganda campaign was spearheaded by Federal Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, who testified at congressional hearings that marijuana caused insanity, and who wrote a truly amazing piece titled "Marijuana -- Assassin of Youth" which posited that the weed could turn your kids into psychotic murderers. This was precisely the plot of the now-classic 1936 exploitation film Reefer Madness:

And of course the rampant, media-fueled hysteria all culminated in the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, but because marijuana still did not disappear, the law was expanded to include draconian penalties in the 1940s and 1050s.

Forgive my nostalgia, but I love this stuff.

I don't know whether it's a coincidence or not, but now that people are so sick of these silly and unconstitutional laws that public sentiment has turned against them, there seems to be a revival of the old "reefer madness" meme. A much-ballyhooed recent Lancet study shows a correlation between prolonged marijuana use and the development of psychoses, and it wouldn't surprise me if people started claiming that the 1930s hysteria was actually not hysteria at all, but a form of wisdom. (Would that be Neo-Reefer Madness?)

The Lancet study is a regurgitation of past research:

LONDON -- Using marijuana seems to increase the chance of becoming psychotic, researchers report in an analysis of past research that reignites the issue of whether pot is dangerous.

The new review suggests that even infrequent use could raise the small but real risk of this serious mental illness by 40 percent.

Doctors have long suspected a connection and say the latest findings underline the need to highlight marijuana's long-term risks. The research, paid for by the British Health Department, is being published Friday in medical journal The Lancet.

"The available evidence now suggests that cannabis is not as harmless as many people think," said Dr. Stanley Zammit, one of the study's authors and a lecturer in the department of psychological medicine at Cardiff University.

The researchers said they couldn't prove that marijuana use itself increases the risk of psychosis, a category of several disorders with schizophrenia being the most commonly known.

There could be something else about marijuana users, "like their tendency to use other drugs or certain personality traits, that could be causing the psychoses," Zammit said.

Does it matter to anyone that prison is a more dangerous consequence than schizophrenia?

Anyway, where it comes to statistics, I am always skeptical. I am sure that the right-kind of number crunching could demonstrate that lot of things people don't like are statistically correlated with other social ills. Abortion might correlate with depression (I'd be surprised if it did not), and homosexuality with AIDS. Does that mean that we should imprison these people to save them? I don't think so.

As a result of these recent reports, though, a number of people are changing their minds. Clayton Cramer no longer supports decriminalizing marijuana, and while I understand his reasoning, it would not matter to me if actual causation were irrefutably demonstrated, because I don't think the government has the right to prevent adult citizens from ingesting whatever they want -- including addictive drugs like heroin, or even deadly poisons like arsenic or strychnine.

As I keep saying, freedom has its costs.

...if there is one lesson I have learned from freedom, it's that there are risks and downsides, and you have to take the good and the bad.

Economies do not always thrive. The American people are acting like a bunch of babies. (Or whiners as Phil Gramm said). Like gays clamoring to shut down the bathhouses once they got AIDS (which some did).

Hedonism, the irresponsible fast lane of freedom, is a high risk activity -- whether economic, sexual, or chemical. You cannot have freedom without allowing it, and people are going to get hurt. Ditto, legal guns.

The problem is, no one wants to hear this.

Beyond that, the more the government intervenes (as they did in this economy), the greater the demand for more intervention when intervention fails, which it inevitably will.

True conservatism (at least, the old fashioned kind) involved allowing freedom and encouraging -- not mandating -- responsibility. It's AYOR (at your own risk) stuff, and it's not for children.

Failure in all these things has to be allowed, but the voters want safety nets and will not allow it.

There's tragedy in this.

Politically speaking, individualism is so unworkable as to be a form of madness.

(I don't doubt that individual resistance to the communitarian impulse could be correlated with insanity....)

MORE: Sean Kinsell has a great piece about the government as an instrument of collective will:

Yes, the federal government is an instrument--"expression" sounds weird to me there--of our collective will. That's exactly why it should be smaller. Americans have principled disagreements over a lot of issues. Getting together and talking about them can help establish goodwill and make things less contentious, but that doesn't mean we're ever going to be able to agree on most of them. Whatever you want to say about the air, state power would be better used if it were contained as much as possible. Competition and the right of exit allow citizens to make the trade-offs that best suit them; collectivism and central planning force citizens to adjust their aspirations to Washington's master plan. It's all very well to use the federal government to "address collective problems," but we still have to decide what those problems are and are not.

My worry is that it might have become ineradicably established.