All it takes is an amoral ability to lie through your teeth with a willingness to fuck up innocent people's lives needlessly.
This is a lengthy article at AlterNet, one of the Progessive sites on the net that have been doing excellent work keeping marijuana reform as a frontpage issue, which it truly is. Raw Story does an excellent job as well. (Daily Kos is still catching up.)
The article starts off talking about that group of 8 former drug warriors who felt it was necessary to regurgitate the Reefer Madness of Ages a couple months ago, after THE PEOPLE of Colorado VOTED to relegalize marijuana.
They truly felt they needed to do this and this article delves into why, exactly.