So while the War On Drugs continues with no end in sight, did allowing this piece of [blanket illegalization] legislation to pass with no debate, actually lead to the down fall of America?
Consider for a moment what it has caused to happen;
• Pollution on a world wide scale, not just in America.
• Becoming dependent on a finite fuel source from mostly foreign imports.
• Inflation due to an inability to become self sufficient.
• Crime in our cities due to the criminalization of a natural resource.
• Farmers inability to raise a cash crop.
• The rise in health care mostly due to obesity and inflated drug prices.
• Deforestation from the need for trees in the manufacture of paper products.
• Millions of jobs lost due to the criminalization of one plant.
• Allowing the monopolies to continue to make policy in America.
• Cheaper more cost efficient products that actually biodegrade, cutting down on garbage.
• The rise in prices of pharmaceuticals. 

Ask yourself, does anyone really know what is in those drugs? I know I don't, how many of your friends or family members takes some sort of pharmaceutical on a daily basis.
The bottom line is they want you to spend money on drugs, but just the ones they make and can control.

Pic from here.

We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

The above are good demands but they are not going to reinstate the living wage in America. Demands must also be easy for the public to get behind.
Public financing would be great but American elections are run at the county level where it is very easy to bribe elections supervisors to allow the theft of elections with electronic Jim Crow voting machines.

• Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

• Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

• Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

• Demand four: Free college education.

• Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

• Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

• Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

• Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

• Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

• Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

• Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

• Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.
by Lloyd J Hart

There is are a couple of unfortunate wrinkles in what would otherwise be true:

If you don't have money, it scarcely matters what the price of goods is. You are still fucked. For virtually everybody this impecunious, having money = having a job, not selling some bonds or re-allocating your portfolio in the direction of a higher-dividend asset assortment. Given the er... not exactly small... number of people who have fallen off this particular bus(with the additional fun that periods of joblessness do wonders for one's future prospects of being re-hired...) "jobs" as something close to an end in itself does represent a net gain for a substantial number of people.

Secondly, you say that "Ideally you would want a world where you have unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is true If and Only If the gains from increased efficiency are allocated in a manner that gives you a slice of the expanding pie. If, however, the pie is expanding; but your share of it is shrinking even faster(because whatever you do is an "inefficiency", you are quickly sliding toward point #1.

Empirically, a great many people have reason to be concerned, and to have no particular room to hope that even steady encheapening of goods will allow them to do better than tread water, since labor is definitely one of the goods being encheapened. As this [investorvillage.com] cheery little J.P. Morgan report notes, in a discussion of the improvement of corporate margins: "There are a lot of moving parts in the margin equation, but as shown in the second chart, reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. This trend has continued; as we have shown several times over the last two years, US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP (see EoTM April 26, 2011)."

Improvements in efficiency do you absolutely no good if somebody with more market power than you have is capturing them. This would appear to be the case. Under such conditions, the people with less market power(ie. about the bottom 95%) don't have a rational interest in efficiency; because they won't capture the gains from it. While(from the perspective of people's actual state of knowledge) the fascination with "jobs" might be largely sentimental populism, it is arguably not economically irrational. If essentially all gains from efficiency(which includes reduction in human resources costs) are being captured by people who aren't you, it is very much in your interest to demand greater inefficiency and attempt to roll back the reduction in demand for you.

Only in a society where everybody has a boat is the fact that the 'rising tide lifts all boats' a comforting one. If a substantial portion of the population is stuck in the mud, the rising tide is not a welcome development...

• Alcohol and Tobacco companies (competing recreational interests)
• Pharmaceutical companies (competing medicinal interests -- they try to derive Marinol, which is only THC)
• Corn-Ethanol producers (competing with hemp, when hemp can create much more oil/acre)
• Oil companies (competing with hemp oil when it's easy to grow, compared to difficult to extract)
• Cotton and other textiles industries (hemp lasts longer, doesn't shrink, easier to produce)
• Timber (hemp can be made into paper and similar products, plus can be grown much more quickly than trees)
• Agribusiness support such as Monsanto (hemp grows SO easily and doesn't require special seeds. it's more nutritious and the seeds in cereals, etc, have more fiber)
• Law enforcement (as long as hemp and cannabis are illegal, there is definite job security)
• Prison industry, including the privately-run prisons (1% of US population in prison, over half that non-violent drug users..., and the prisons get paid per prisoner)
• The military supply industry, and also many corporations such as Target Stores, Microsoft, Motorola, etc, because "Hey, prison labor is dirt cheap!"
• Politicians whose bases believe the rhetoric. They fear that if they stand up against prohibition, they will be voted out.
• Drug cartels in Mexico and the US, which make tons of money because everything they do is under the table, and they get paid a ton compared to what their product would cost if it were legal.
• Cannabis growing farms for dispensaries, and all of the niches that have sprung up as a result of the "pseudo-legality" of Cannabis, such as pot-docs, ID card places, and dispensaries. With legalization, they would have to compete in a much tighter market, and the jobs of pot-docs and ID card manufacturers would dissolve. And good riddance.