The weed with its roots in heck

OK, suppose you wanted to go out to the movies in Chicago in December 1951. Maybe you wouldn't have found "Reefer Madness" itself, but it looks as if you could have had a pretty good time down at the Linden anyway. 

We do, in short, have rather a tradition of lurid presentations of drug use in American popular culture. One might even suggest that media representations have something to do with how the public at large thinks about this sort of thing. So it's a little odd, here in the broad sunny uplands of 2012, to run across these snippets from advice columns in the first few pages of the local fishwrap's feature section:

Dear Amy: I am a graduate student in my late 20s. My mother has been addicted to marijuana my whole life. She says it's for lower back pain, but when she gets high it is impossible to talk to her.

Dear Carolyn: ... We are both marijuana addicts. After a few relapses over the last couple of years, I've been clean of marijuana for four months.

Which does sort of cause one to wonder: Is this the current state of play in the medical literature? If not, do you suppose there might be some benefit in -- oh, say, editing the agony aunts* before you run them?

* It may be a little weird to think of Amy and Carolyn this way, but there you are. I was a bit surprised that the OED only dates "agony auntie" to 1972, though "agony column" -- for their output -- can be found as early as 1854. Apparently, some journalistic products never grow stale.