Legalizing Marijuana Is a Big Mistake
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My feeling is that it is not a big mistake, but a move in the right direction. It's a good thing that a simple pleasure no longer results in a life ruined by the US "justice system" as we've seen since 1970. Whatever the externalities are, they are better than treating people as criminals for a victimless crime.
Where I am in Maryland, it became legal for recreational use about 2 weeks ago. There are also degrees of legality in nearby Washington DC and Virginia. The voters of these states decided it.
Having an abortion is the woman's mistake to make.
In fact, doing X to Y's own body is Y's mistake to make.
Suddenly a whole class of distracting political questions vanish.
Applying libertarian (left or right) axioms when trying to understand the reasoning of authoritarians simply does not work.
This is not my understanding of libertarian philosophy, but I've heard many self-described libertarians seeming to endorse it. I believe that's why "libertarian" has become a dirty word, to the many people who would find themselves worse off in a world that has lots of liberty for a specific set of people, but less for many others.
Something what might be terrible for you might be wonderful for someone else. I would actually go so far as to say that we decriminalize all drugs.
I say that as a non-user of "drugs", as in, heroin/cocaine/lsd, the kind of stuff they taught us about in DARE. If you or someone else wants to become a cokehead or a heroin addict, then you should have a method and a path to do so that allows for the safest way to do that with the least amount of life-damaging consequence possible for you.
Would legalizing heroin turn the world into an opium den full of depravity? No.
It used to be legal in America and was even sold as a cough syrup that also came with a healthy dose of marijuana and cocaine, and America did not suddenly become or stop being anything other than what it was.
Some things are going to be done by people no matter what barriers are put into place to stop them. Murderers murder. Alcoholics get DUIs, and even with cigarettes costing $10 a pack poor people still smoke them.
If you accept that as a universal rule you can then pivot to find methods to take as much harm out of the inevitability of the event as possible, not only for the person doing the event but also for the people caught in their wake.
For instance, the illegalization of marijuana has caused hundreds of thousands of children to grow up whose fathers are in prison for the non-violent offense of getting high, and has caused even more poor children to grow up in households where their funds were taxed by the harrowing expenses of probation and having a parent who would be automatically excluded from the majority of good paying jobs for the crime of consuming a plant that the second worst president in human history, Richard Nixon, didn't approve of.
Those are social costs that we all have to pay every single day, that is the world our grandparents left for us. Legalizing marijuana and other drugs would put an abrupt end to that social tax, and even though the consequences will continue to be felt for generations, if we stop re-filling the bucket then eventually it will empty, and wouldn't that be a sight worth working towards seeing?
If your argument is that you have absolute freedom to consume whatever pleasures you, then all drugs should be legalized like fentanyl and when the society crumbles with drug addicts dying on every street, it is already too late to stop.
However, the jury is still out, and there is the issue where unless you're Willie Nelson you aren't exactly chain smoking joints the way your average hardcore cigarette smoker does, so even if marijuana is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco, being exposed to a lower dose may mitigate that to enough of an extent as to make it a rounding error.
Either way, you are more likely to be killed in a dispute over marijuana than you are by marijuana consumption itself.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-study-finds...
It’s hard to say exactly why, but it is reality.
No doubt that if you're smoking a blunt or a joint, it's not good for your lungs. But the person to whom I was replying attributed millions of deaths annually to "smoking", implying that smoking weed was to blame.
Basically, his argument boils down to "Cannabis legalization didn't have as positive an impact as promised, so it should be made illegal again". Before aggressively cherry picking sources to back his point, he even complains about the portrayal of his (minority) opinion as being held exclusively by stodgy, stuck-up old men, before going on a stodgy, old-man rant about kids these days.