The type of child sexual abuse horror story you relate is not caused by the presence of marijuana. Sadly, people have been using alcohol for the same purpose for as long as it's been around. They've also been using pharmaceutical drugs like Valium, which have been around less than a century.

In the past 100 years, this society has accepted the widespread use of newly invented mind-altering drugs: meprobamate, diazepam type tranquilizers, methylphenidate, several variants of amphetamine, synthetic opiates like Darvon, SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft. All have a potential for abuse. People (and often their friends and families in association) have had occasional problems with the misuse and overuse of all of them. But "society" hasn't fallen apart as a result. I'd say that on the whole, the impact has been minimal. There are millions of people in this country who take prescribed amphetamines and SSRIs- and who smoke pot- every day. I can't say that I've noticed any particular difference in my day-to-day interactions with people, which are almost always both benevolent and rather routine. But some of those people are, in fact, "on something."

There's simply no reason to make cannabis use a Federal case. It doesn't rise to that level of a problem. And it's possible to lament the high number of people in modern American society resorting to psychoactive drugs- of all types, including the legally prescribed ones- without making it into a law enforcement crusade. Although I have to say that if people realized the history of how much Americans used to drink, they'd have a more balanced historical perspective on the whole "drug use in society" thing. Read the opening chapters of Herbert Asbury's Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition some time. It's an eye-opener.

http://www.questia.com/library/book/the-great-illusion-an-informal-history-of-prohibition-by-herbert-asbury.jsp

Questia is an on-line book pay site that offers free trials- I've linked the above to my signature.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Illusion-Informal-History-Prohibition/dp/0837100089

As for the the stereotypes and projections of the "mad cartoonist": it sound to me as if you're only noticing the dysfunctional pot smokers. After all, why would you notice the functional ones?

I'll stake my professional reputation on the fact that alcohol is orders of magnitude more hazardous than marijuana. Although that's hardly required- the comparisons are easily available in toxicological and medical literature.

You don't think alcohol can make some people "paranoid"? Too much alcohol is capable of making people almost anything. Beyond a BAC of about .16, sober people basically find themselves dealing with subhumans. I've had sub-stuporously drunk passengers in my cab who couldn't have been more deranged if they had decided to chew jimson weed root.

Yet alcohol is legal, and should remain so- because the problems associated with prohibiting it are worse than those associated with permitting it. Most adults manage to use it without doing serious harm to themselves or others.

I should mention that the Ishmael Reed scene I spoke of is more than simply funny- it builds some authentic sexual tension, and there's considerable foreplay, in the form of charged verbal sparring.

Even though neither of the characters is depicted particularly admirably, there's a cohort of feminists who really have it in for Reed for scenes like that one. Pretty much the same people who would ban The Taming Of The Shrew from the canon, in my opinion. But that will continue to be a matter of dispute, no doubt.

In the fine line between rough sex and non-consensual sex?

Dude...in the scene we're discussing, there isn't even any foreplay. Not even verbally.

You couldn't do a sex scene more simplistically by drawing stick figures.

I doubt there's anything wrong with your taste in literature that reading a lot more of it won't cure. But I think you should do that.

(As for Barbara Cartland...look it up. There's a Wiki entry.)

My taste in sex scenes, in great literature? There's one in All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. Not really sex, just "foreplay." It's great literature. (I don't recommend you skip ahead trying to find it, either. It lessens the impact. Read the entire book, from the beginning. It's a true classic of American fiction. And it gets out of the gate much faster than Atlas Shrugged. )

As for "rough sex"- Ishmael Reed writes a really funny one in The Last Days of Louisiana Red. And in that one, the line between "rough sex" and "non-consensual" actually does blur considerably- in marked contrast to the "stranger-invades-home-and-throws-woman-to-floor" caveman scene in The Fountainhead.

Also notable- in Reed's scene, neither the male or the female characters are held up as flawless role models of perfection for humanity.

But unlike Ayn Rand, that isn't Ishmael Reed's game, either thematically or in terms of character study. In my reading experience, Rand is sort of in a class by herself in that department (although I admit, I have yet to delve into the literary oeuvre of Soviet Socialist Realism. I've been given the impression that the character development is along much the same lines- with the necessary didactic changes having been made, of course.)