US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

The greatest thing about tight, upcoming elections is that governments actually start to do a tiny bit of what people want. Great result.

It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, doesn't it? Why haven't they taken action until now? People aren't children to be appeased by such gestures.

Unfortunately according to many people in power we’re more like the “bewildered herd” of Walter Lippmann:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

While I've not read that book, the synopsis from Wiki would suggest that the arguments put forth in there are almost entirely obsolete owing to the internet. In particular:

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The buying public: the "bewildered herd" (a term here borrowed from The Phantom Public) must pay to understand the unseen environment by the mass communications media. The irony is that although the public's opinion is important, it must pay for its acceptance. People will be selective and will buy the most factual media at the lowest price: "For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps." The media have the social function of transmitting public affairs information and their business profit role of surviving in the market.

Nature of news: people publish already-confirmed news that are thus less disputable. Officially-available public matters will constitute "the news" and unofficial (private) matters are unavailable, are less available, or are used as "issues" for propaganda.

News truth and conclusion: the function of news is to signal an event, and that signalling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement; journalism creates and sows the seeds (news) that establish public opinion.

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Not only is access to information now completely free, but it's not even uncommon that a regular person is more well informed on any given topic than either the media or ostensibly highly informed political figures. See: Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [1] Outside of classification, we have all have access to, more or less, the same information. And, at this point, it's absolutely common to see high level political figures and the media both making plainly factually incorrect statements and implications, that are not only disputable but simply objectively wrong.

If anything, the real bias in society seems to do more with people believing what they want to be true, instead of what is true. Of course the exact same bias also has clearly infected politicians, the media, and so on.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

Pretty sure the Internet has not only not made manufacture of consent obsolete, it has greatly aided it. The book already calls out the public wanting truth for a dollar. Now they can have a custom truth that caters to their biases for a fraction of a cent! However, that doesn't mean anything for the subtle message this "truth" carries: a TikTok video can still carry a call to action just as well as a newspaper article (see recent interest in Osama Bin Laden for an example).

Don't you think your own example contradicts your premise? People have radically different biases. And so manufacturing consent requires the elimination of dissenting views, yet the internet specifically enables those views to flourish. For instance I had absolutely no idea what you were talking about with regards to Bin Laden, yet 30 seconds later I was reading a letter he wrote that there have apparently been widespread efforts to try to censor.

Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one, and that's simply not possible. And even if it were, that clearly artificial homogeneity would itself drive distrust. See the USSR where the government not only directly controlled literally every single medium for communication, but also strictly ideologically filtered for admittance (or exit) from the country. Nonetheless this led to widespread jokes like, "Why do we have two newspapers, Pravda (meaning truth) and Novesti (meaning news)? Well that's because there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."

So we can even go one step further and say that to manufacture consent you need to not only eliminate all dissenting views, but you also need to somehow hide that from your public and make them believe that what they are reading is free to diverge from the official narrative. Chomsky, of course, hit on this exact nuance with his famous quote, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." But now a days you can no longer limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, because with the internet you can find communities where basically any view, no matter how fringe, is the norm.