There was a time in the U.S. when no one talked about the “marijuana problem” because one didn’t exist. That was before the government intervened.

The year was 1937. The U.S. was still mired in the depression and amazingly, the government throwing money at the problem wasn’t helping. “Reefer Madness” wasn’t a catch phrase; it was a movie. Harry J. Anslinger wasn’t some douche in our history books but a living, delusional racist on a hunt for power. “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana, he would drop dead of fright,” Anslinger said in 1937.

Although many states had enacted their own bans on cannabis by this time, the “Marihuana Tax Act” put a prohibitive tax on the plant at the federal level; if you didn’t have a tax stamp for your cannabis – which you couldn’t afford – you were breaking the law. “I believe in some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania,” Anslinger remarked at a hearing on the MTA. Without much debate and hearing the drumbeat of the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst preaching the ills of cannabis, Congress prohibited marijuana on a federal level for the first time.

So cannabis and marijuana wasn’t really a problem, but a government agent made it one and the mighty U.S. government came to the rescue with prohibition, something that had just been proven not to work in reducing alcohol consumption. Not only didn’t it work for alcohol, but it caused one of the most violent periods in U.S. history.

Fast forward to 1970. The hippies are protesting what is now Richard Nixon’s war in Vietnam and Tricky Dick strikes back with The Controlled Substances Act, which puts cannabis on Schedule I and makes everything to do with cannabis explicitly illegal under federal law. The government comes to the rescue once again!

Fast forward again, this time to 2016. Marijuana use is at an all-time high. Realizing the folly of prohibition, states and cities across the U.S. are decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis.

So to recap: there was no problem, then the government outlawed cannabis and created a problem (the violence and loss of liberties that come with marijuana prohibition), and now people across the country have to vote to fix the problem that the government created.

I don’t mean to beat you all over the head with logic, but wouldn’t it have been easier if the government hadn’t created the problem to begin with?