Akonyl wrote:
yes. Now to see if this poll sparks an argument like a past topic :x
I'll try my best!
aly_angelflight wrote:
Ideally, I would prefer they stay illegal, so I answered "No", but people are going to get ahold of them anyhow if they really want to.
Alcohol and cigarettes are both far more dangerous in many, many more ways than is marijuana. Depending on what your criteria are for banning it, you need to be consistent and apply it across the board.
Let me just put it this way:
Marijuana should not be criminalized in any way. Marijuana is a very harmless "drug" to the recreational user that has been proven to have indisputable healthcare benefits for those suffering from a variety of diseases.
This doesn't mean that it has to be available to every person no matter their age. Limit it to 18+ like cigarettes and alcohol if you want. Let stores decide whether they want to sell it or not. All of that is not even the actual problem. The people in this topic have already realized the reality, and that is simply: People will get drugs no matter how extensive the war on them is, no matter how criminalized they are, and no matter how severe the punishment is for them doing so.
Let's rundown some quick facts:
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Over $15 billion dollars was spent by the U.S. government combating drugs in 2010. Do you really think it's been working? Of course it hasn't. When you outlaw something,
you create its black market. When you create a black market, you create violence that otherwise did not exist. If you don't want people killing each other over drugs, don't make it so that they are forced into a situation where that's inevitable. Prohibition taught us that outlawing things literally guarantees three things: people will make a lot of untaxed money from the outlawed product, people will instigate violence that otherwise had no reason to exist for the outlawed product, and people will get the outlawed product regardless. You want to stop the cartels south of the border from killing every man, woman, and child (of which there are countless) that gets in their way? Stop giving them such a lucrative market! The strict drug laws in the U.S. are what many cartels rely on to function. They make enormous sums of money that you can't even begin to fathom, just because the prices of outlawed drugs are so high due to the risk involved.
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630,223 have been arrested thus far this year for marijuana "offenses".
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"Arrests for drug law violations this year are expected to exceed the 1,663,582 arrests of 2009. Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.6 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense in 2009."
Now, let's talk about government competency. Do you really, honestly,
truly trust the government to enforce drug laws fairly? Really? When you are arrested for drugs, your entire life can be ruined for something
you chose to do yourself that is of no harm to any other person. Unless you are harming someone else, do you really want the government to be telling you what you can and cannot do with your own body? The government is run by people and people make mistakes--a lot of them--and when those people are obeying laws (and bad ones), they tend to make even more mistakes. Maybe you are comfortable giving up your freedoms to a government system that is responsible for governing a few hundred million people blindly, but I'm not.
If people want to do drugs, they will do them, and the strict drug laws are not saving people from drugs. If marijuana was legalized tomorrow, do you know what I'd do? ...Exactly the same thing I always do:
Not smoke marijuana. Many opponents of legalization assume that if such a drug is legalized, everrrybody will suddenly start doing it (of which there's nothing wrong with that, as it should be their right as a human being to make that decision). I support legalizing marijuana as much as anyone, and yet I've never done a single drug in my entire life, so before someone thinks it's because I like da drugz, it's not. It's a basic human right to be in control of your own life, and these drug laws are simply nonsensically interfering with your rights to freedom.
Summary: If a problem can be solved with more freedom instead of less freedom, then the solution is already evident. In this case, the "less freedom" approach has gotten us absolutely nowhere other than putting people in jail for no reason (the U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the entire world thanks to the drug war) and seeing a lot of lives lost that otherwise wouldn't be.
That's a quick summation of my argument on this subject. I abbreviated some points because explaining even further will take all day, so there you go. I don't know if I'll reply to anything more in this topic, but hopefully there's someone out there who agrees with this position that will carry the torch.
