Weed is so demonized because it makes the user “lazy” aka content and happy, which has no economic value.

Small business tyrants operating pizza parlors and other takeout food and snack dispensing services strongly disagree, as does the cannabis industry. Weed can and is integrated into capitalist value extraction wherever it is sufficiently normalized under a capitalist economic system.

All value ascribed to particular drugs is largely ideological. They obviously do have their own distinct neuropharmacology and other observable material effects, but at the end of a day, for almost anything that has a history of widespread recreational and therapeutic use, patterns of usage and the context in which that use happens matter more than the properties of that substance itself. And societal attitudes towards the drug are almost fully uncoupled from either of that.

Objectively, a drug is a tool that can be used or misused. Societally, this approach goes largely unrecognized and is instead repaced with mythology and poorly understood heuristics, to the detriment of everybody.