A Rational Argument For Why Marijuana Should Be Illegal?
I’m still waiting to hear a rational argument for why marijuana should be illegal in the same society where cigarettes & alcohol are legal.
If you don’t believe in civil liberties and you think anything that could possibly be considered a “public health risk” should be illegal then I guess I can understand where you’re coming from (although I obviously disagree with you and think your mentality is scary as hell) but if you somehow think it makes sense that cigarettes & alcohol are legal while marijuana is not then we’ve got ourselves a problem.
Let’s take a look at some of the common reasons people give for why marijuana should be illegal.
#1 Public Health
I won’t claim that marijuana is necessarily “good for you” but it is without a doubt less dangerous for the public health than cigarettes and alcohol. Cigarettes are linked to thousands of deaths every year (cancer) and they are even linked to health problems in OTHER people (second hand smoke.) Alcohol is also linked to thousands of deaths every year (drunk driving accidents mostly) and to many instances of physical abuse.
Marijuana? Maybe it makes people a bit “lazy” (if your perception is that people should base their lives around “working for the man” that is.) But obviously that’s not always the case. Michael Phelps apparently smokes pot from time to time and he’s an Olympic champion. How lazy is he? And that’s just one example. There are many people who lead successful lives while smoking marijuana.
#2 It’s A “Gateway Drug”
Nonsense. You can use the same “logic” to say that cigarettes and alcohol are “gateway drugs” as people almost always smoke and drink before they move onto harder drugs. Hell you can use the same logic to make the claim that milk is a “gateway drug.” It’s just a completely meaningless term. Next.
#3 Crime
Of course it’s associated with crime. It’s illegal! If it wasn’t illegal it wouldn’t be associated with crime. See alcohol prohibition in the 1920s for more information on how this works.
In fact crime is one of the best reasons to make marijuana legal. Legalizing marijuana would take the crime incentive away and it would free up valuable resources (time and money) towards combating real crime (you know where one person actually harms another person.)
Still Waiting…
I’m still waiting for anyone to make a rational argument as to why marijuana should be illegal while cigarettes & alcohol are not. It just doesn’t make any sense. At all.
And I haven’t even got into the fact that legalizing marijuana would be a potential boon for the government as far as tax revenue. In this time of economic turmoil it is obviously the right thing to do for that reason as well.
But the number reason marijuana should be legalized is because of personal freedom. It is simply wrong for the government to tell people what they can and cannot do with their own bodies in their own space. This comes down to a moral issue. It is immoral for a government to restrict people’s personal lives in this way.
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