What is the reasoning behind being against recreational, but for medical?

This will get downvotes, but not because I'm wrong. It's because I'm stating truth that some will not want to hear.

Medical is an easier sell, because it makes an emotional appeal, based on the idea of alleviating suffering. To a degree, I do consider it genuine psychological warfare, and although I smoke myself, it's something I've never been entirely comfortable with, although it is a standard Left strategy. It operates on the assumption that the ends justify the means.

Broadly speaking, the Left and Right correspond with women and men. This means that while the Right fights in the way men do, with direct physical force, the Left fights the way women do; indirectly, and via social, economic, and psychological manipulation.

The Left primarily operate by making appeals either to moral superiority or emotion; again, feminine tactics. The idea is that you don't try to get the general or universal form of what you want from the word go, because that will meet with excessive resistance and will fail, so you use a gradual approach; psychological attrition. Compassion is a highly exploitable psychological vulnerability, with the added bonus that you make yourself sound holy when you appeal to it, which makes what you are saying extremely difficult for anyone to resist, without your position being defended by everyone else. Once you've got the public to accept medical marijuana, then they will become acculturated to it sufficiently, that eventually general, non-recreational use will be accepted.

This is also the reason why the gay movement started with marriage as their first topic, rather than the acceptability of homosexuality in general; because they knew that general acceptability of homosexuality was a fight that they could not win. By moving directly to the topic of marriage, it presumes that homosexuality in more general or fundamental terms has already been accepted.

/r/eldertrees Thread