Just checked with one if our interns. Those still exist.
We are not getting invited.
May have something to do with being able to remember '78 
From the late 1970’s to early 1980’s it seemed like both People and Time (US) magazines always had at least one topless female picture, although sometimes it was very small. It wasn’t too long after Reagan took office that they stopped that (does anyone know the exact date and reason?) To me, that felt like the start of the puritanical movement.
I think to some extent it’s just your own nostalgia. I grew up in almost the same time period (I went to college 1980-1984) and my experiences were quite different. In particular, “sex was easy to come by”, from your OP, was not true for me, or for most people I knew.
The '30s were actually pretty awesome. The Depression wasn’t of course, but that’s all anyone remembers. A lot of the good stuff was actually material culture, and never caught on because too many people couldn’t buy anything.
You’ve used the term “thin legal fictions” twice now, but laws allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes are not “legal fictions”; they are regular laws, properly passed by elected representatives in state and local governments, and in some cases mandated by popular vote.
The main dispute over such laws is the fact that they currently run counter to federal prohibitions on marijuana, and this jurisdictional issue has become a bone of contention in cases where the feds decide that they’re going to take action.
I’ll have to disagree, a little. I think the fiction is that mj is being used for medical purposes, when, in an awful lot of cases, it is being used recreationally. You can find a doctor who will write a “recommendation” if you simply tell him you have a headache. This is the “thin legal fiction” that some of us find troubling.
Some doctors also write prescriptions for pain medication too easily. It doesn’t mean that the laws allowing pain medication are “legal fictions”; it simply means that some doctors are acting unethically and possibly illegally.
Are there doctors who literally do nothing but write prescriptions for narcotics, and that’s their entire practice? No, I don’t think there are. Marijuana dispensaries sometimes even have things like neon lights of a marijuana leaf in their windows, for god’s sake. Do pharmacies have neon lights of a Vicodin pill?
The marijuana recommendation business is VERY much wink-wink-nudge-nudge. It’s incredibly silly that this roundabout way of allowing marijuana is necessary.
I know it is, but that doesn’t mean that the law itself, and the rules governing medical marijuana, constitute a “legal fiction.”
I agree. The stuff should be completely legal and available for purchase.
I think it’s fair to call it a legal fiction that marijuana is only allowed for medical purposes.
I got busted by some county-mounties in a small city in Idaho in '79. We were just a little too incautious about it. They confiscated our weed (short of an ounce) and our paraphernalia, frisked us, and sent us on our way with a “stern warning”. In those parts, I have heard some residents say that they take your weed and a week or two later, you would be buying it back from one of their middlemen. In many parts of the country, statutes notwithstanding, weed was rarely a primary offense.
I was born in the late 40’s so I can speak from memory about the 50’s and later and to tell the truth, people were about as prudish or, alternately, without inhibition back then as they are now. The difference lies in the moral tone of the media and of our lawmakers. I don’t think that the Baby Boomers went conservative as much as the conservatives among them eventually became more politically effective than the liberals. This trend continued into the present day. Despite the Right’s constant harping about “liberal media bias” the fact is, the organizations that deliver the news to most Americans, are pretty much conservative in nature and have shaped national debates and focus of conservative causes more effectively than the news sources that are liberal.