Does anyone else think it's weird that it's illegal to sell colloidal silver despite it being used as a relatively effective medicine for centuries because drinking it turns your skin blue
No, it's not illegal. At least not in the USA, anyhow. What's a crime is claiming it's a medical treatment and/or supplement- that's fraud, and that's only allowed if you're a politician.
Silver has no function in the human body, positive or negative. It isn't toxic like other heavy metals (re: lead, mercury, etc.) so it hasn't been illegalized for human consumption, but various medical groups, including the FDA, have researched and found zero medical benefits nor efficacy in treating any known disease.
Ergo, a crime to claim it's got beneficial medical properties on the label.
marijuana is illegal and cigarettes aren't
That's a long story, and one heavily connected to illegal immigration sparked during the Mexican Revolution. Lots of Mexicans fled to the US- causing all sorts of border issues, violence, and bringing their drugs with them.
Including a fun little cultivar of marijuana that packed a particularly strong punch for the time. Which they
also liked to lace with other, significantly less benign, drugs. Including cocaine and some precursor drugs that would one day be fully refined into 'crack cocaine'.
The plant was barely known to American culture at the time- being used more for medical benefits than any sort of narcotics purposes. Mainly because Americans of the time had legal opium.
Pot ain't got shit on opium. As a pain killer, as a high, as a life-wrecking addictive substance. Even today, opium is one of the most potent drugs to have ever been created. And they used to give it to children. No wonder these people weren't interested in weed.
Ergo, it was easy for the feds to just illegalize marijuana as a whole. A few doctors objected (it was a great pain reliever and was even being used to treat seizures at the time- and we now have
proof it can work on those, sometimes), but the overwhelming majority of people only knew about MJ as 'that drug that those violent thugs use'.
Marijuana only started becoming viable in the American market after people realized that
maybe the drug that ruined China might not be safe. But by then law and cultural attitude had been entrenched for over a generation, and it's hard to fight inertia.
Meanwhile, tobacco... delivers what it promises, and has managed to keep its nose clean of the nastier cultural associations for most of its history. Including an anti-endorsement from the Nazis (they were among the first to discover and announce health risks of tobacco- but, they were also fucking Nazis, so that just made tobacco more popular).