Then why is it that that here on /. a universal complaint is when "the MBA's showed up and optimized everything for cashflow and the company went to pot"? It's because those "MBA's" took away whatever traces of things like autonomy, master and purpose were there and replaced them with purely financial considerations, and IT folks *HATE* that.

Exactly zero of the great engineers I've worked with showed up in the morning and said "today I'm going to earn 1/365 of my annual salary therefore today I'm going to kick ass and produce some serious good product." On the contrary, they showed up every morning and kicked ass and produced great product BECAUSE THEY COULD KICK ASS AND PRODUCE GREAT PRODUCT, because they company was a space where they could do that.

Honestly, all the posts on this thread saying "IT'S THE MONEY" are smoking dope. If you take blasé, disenchanted engineers pay them more, all you get is overpaid blasé, disenchanted engineers.

Jeez, has nobody linked to this already? Here's NORML's point-by-point carefully reasoned response to the White House: http://blog.norml.org/2011/10/29/white-house-response-to-normls-we-the-people-marijuana-legalization-petition/#more-7406

Highlights:

“Addiction” links to a NIDA page noting the lifetime dependence rate of cannabis to be 9% – that is, 9 in 100 people who try cannabis will develop a dependence. Kerlikowske does not mention that caffeine has the same 9% rate, alcohol is a 15% rate, and tobacco is a 32% rate

“Respiratory disease” links to a 2008 Science Daily article on a study entitled “Bullous Lung Disease due to Marijuana” which looked at the cases of ten people who came in already complaining of lung problems, who admitted they smoked pot over a year.

“Cognitive impairment” links to a 1996 NIDA fact sheet on studies of cognitive impairment involving card sorting. Since then A 2001 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found chronic users who quit for a week “showed no significant differences from control subjects”. A 2002 clinical trial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal determined, “Marijuana does not have a long-term negative impact on global intelligence.”

And it goes on and on. Jeez, the informational content of Chief Kerlikowske's report really is close to zero, isn't it?