The government doesn't really care about the quality of actual people's lives, of course. It has only two priorities: power and money. And in the issue of medicinal cannabis, I think power is their motivation for opposing it.

You see, for whatever reason, it's spent the past seven decades trying to convince the public that cannabis is this evil narcotic that kills people, makes people go insane, tears down the moral fabric of society, etc. etc. etc. And for the most part, the public wholeheartedly believed it—at least up until the Beat generation and of course the hippie generation, when people started experimenting with it en masse.

But the people who were smoking it had, for the most part, a decidedly anti-government attitude. Beats and hippies were questioning authority and declaring themselves in opposition to the policies of the government. Had the government relented and reversed their slander campaign against cannabis, it would have looked to the public like it was giving in to the demands of its enemies. Any power analyst will tell you that if you want to hold on to power, or create the illusion that you are powerful, the last thing you want to do is to change your mind and give in to the arguments of your opponents.

The government may know very well that cannabis isn't going to kill anybody, that it's less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, and that they might very well make a lot of money if it were made legal. But all these considerations are outweighed by the simple fact that if the government were to reverse its policies on cannabis, it would be essentially admitting that it has been lying to us for seventy years. It would lose the support of huge segments of the population who have grown up with its lies and wholeheartedly believe them. Politically, it would spell suicide for anyone in the government who tried to do it. And in the world of electoral politics, facts and ethics don't matter. Only power.