Marijuana

Marijuana should be legal due to several reasons. First legalizing marijuana allows more freedom for people to participate in activities that provide escapism and pleasure. Secondly, legalizing marijuana will reduce the crime rate and abolish the drug wars. Thirdly, legalizing marijuana will allow the prison population to decrease, thus allowing the country to increase its revenue because of its decreased expenditures on its prison population.

I sometimes think that the majority of humans born into a western society are emotionally invested in making fellow human beings suffer, in other words, these people won't feel like they have accomplished anything unless they've made someone cry at the end of the day.

Some people have the nerve to say that alcohol and tobacco should be illegal along with marijuana and all the other God designed natural drugs which give our lives the slightest joy during the hectic haze of everyday life. People, wake up, we are not robot workers, we are human beings but our society, government, culture and education has raised us all to believe we are mindless consumers, as if we are some sort of livestock.

Ah, yes. "Would you like crack with that?" or "I don't have any weed on me right now. But would you like some crack?". Or even sometimes throwing in some crack for free just to get you hooked.

Marijuana is a sort of gateway in that it's being illegal forces people who want to use it to consort with drug dealers and people who they wouldn't otherwise associate with if not for the legality of marijuana. This association with certain criminal elements is the gateway, rather than marijuana itself being the gateway.

My stance covers agreement and disagreement to extents, so I'll say I'm neutral. I believe that if marijuana were legal, I would be in complete disagreement that it is a gateway drug.

People - especially fucked up people - easily make the jump straight from alcohol to crack. No "ticket" required.

Marijuana is no more of a gateway drug than coffee.

Yes, but why not make money off of it? Even if it's true that marijuana is a gateway drug (which it's not), then decriminalizing it only speeds up the process without any benefits. Legalizing it would speed up the process but at the same time, make billions of dollars. This would be harsh of me to say if in fact marijuana was a gateway drug. But it's not. So legalize it.

Yes, but it'd be even better to legalize it.

Yes. People should have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies. Personally, I oppose use, but I do not want to use the force of government to enforce this kind of preference on other people.

If you try something and like it, our basic animal instinct is to want to try other things similar to it. Humans however, can use education to override that instinct. If you like marijuana, it's natural to be curious about other drugs, but it's also natural to use reason to determine whether it's a good idea to try out a particular drug. When people talk about a "gateway drug", they're assuming a person is a slave to their animal instincts, who is incapable of using reason to decide for themselves whether to act upon them. They also assume that a gateway drug is a bad thing. Many people might not have had mushrooms had they not first tried marijuana but many of those people think that's a good thing.

Current law is insane.

Rather than repeat the already stated reasons for legalization, I think I have a different angle.:

For my entire life I have lived in an area of heavy marijuana use. It is generally accepted as socially acceptable, and is rarely a matter of interest among police. This very same area has never in my memory had an issue with harder, more dangerous drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

Likewise, in the larger city roughly 50 kilometers away, the police have spent the last 20 years in a strict crackdown on marijuana, and have been successful to the point where the city seems almost entirely free from both users and dealers. However, the void left by the absence of majiuana has been filled by much more alarming and addictive substances.

As such, I believe from my own observations that the crackdown on majiuna use and it's criminalization is a bad thing because, among other reasons, it serves as a alternative to more addictive and deadly substances.

Dr. Dale Gieringer's assertion that marijuana users self-regulate is interesting. On the one hand, his point needs empirical research to back it up. On the other hand, it's a moot point - if pure THC itself does any harm then it obviously does more harm if there's more of it - but to use Barack Obama's words: "I inhaled frequently - that was kinda the point".

This is a good example of taxpayer money used to misinform the public with one side of the story. I'm by no means suggesting that marijuana use does not cause depression. I'm merely saying that the science is NOT settled, when we have scientists publishing the opposite view to the government in peer reviewed journals.

There's obvious a related question here: clearly the US government agencies responsible for drug control need to constantly justify their position - to not do so would be to not justify their existence. They're in the same position as an employee explaining to their boss why they shouldn't be made redundant. That is not to say that the employee isn't useful or even great - it's merely saying it's highly unlikely he/she will have an unbiased opinion.

Should also have questions here regarding:

Is marijuana a gateway drug?
Is moderate marijuana use dangerous to health?
- does it effect memory / intelligence long term?
- does it cause cancer - i.e. the active ingredient THC

Regarding health, there is this potency argument that assumes marijuana is more dangerous if it's more potent... But if the real danger is cancer from smoking, then more potent marijuana potentially allows the same high to be delivered without requiring the inhalation of so many carcinogens.

A question on medical marijuana too...