Re: aside from the obvious hard drugs
"What worries me is that pharmaceutical companies have been trying to produce THC pills"
Just to clarify, there's a UK trial of the Sativex product by GW Healthcare. The bottle states that each 100 microlitre spray contains 2.7mg delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and 2.5mg cannabidiol from Cannabis Sativa. The company say that you get the medical benefits without the high.
A friend of mine with some serious and painful illnesses who's managed to wrangle themself onto the programme says that you damned well can get high from it, but only if you take a heavy dose. Apparently it works medicinally quite well though. Better than slow-release morphine, but "not as well as a bud", so says the afflicted one. It also costs the NHS something like £240 per month to provide it, which might explain many doctors' reticence in prescribing it. Basically it costs the NHS more than it would cost someone to buy raw bud from a dealer in ounces, given the medicinal dose for bud is a lot lower than you'd have to get high.
Of course at 300W for a grow, with photoperiod plants, 18h veg cycle and 12h bud cycle, you'd spend maybe £100-£150 or so at the usual per-KW/h electricity prices to make several ounces of your own at home. In metric, you're looking at maybe 0.5g per watt of lighting if you do it right, or at least so say the books on the subject. Doing so would put you into serious-legal-penalty territory and it gets worse if you try and make it neat and tidy, because that means it's a "sophisticated" grow. You probably will be doing time if caught, might well lose your job, could lose your children if the courts decide you're unfit to look after them, could very well lose your home if it's a rented property (as increasing numbers of homes in the UK are). And all over a grow tent.
People say that marijuana induces insanity. Maybe, perhaps, but only in the minds of the lawmakers.