Yes. Because for many drugs, misuse can cause harm to others. And in the case of minors, who are legally held to be immature and unable to make sufficient life decisions like not taking some heroine or dope or whatever just before class, it would be particularly irresponsible to allow such medications to be available in any person’s medicine drawer–particularly if some of those are highly addictive.
Skiing isn’t a drug
It doesn’t cause car wrecks
It isn’t addictive
It doesn’t result in major injuries in the grand majority of all cases
It is exercise
It is fun experience for the whole family
It is a way to meet people in a fun and healthy environment
If you don’t learn how to ski, you’re going to be screwed when the next ice age occurs
This statement is meaningless unless you can tell me what the terms mean. How many people is “commonly used?” How long is “an extended period of time?” What does “successfully made illegal” mean?
If neuron star is correct and half of all Americans try pot by age 18, has it “successfully been made illegal?” Doesn’t this just prove that criminalization has failed and that something else, like legalization and regulation, needs to be tried? In other words, as I said, if you’re correct and legalization is irreversible, doesn’t that mean that banning it was never going to work, and hasn’t worked, to begin with?
---------------- Since they’ve already been legal and are now illegal, doesn’t that mean that banning them is doomed to failure and that legalization is the way to go?
Er, no. The ban on LSD hasn’t been “a failure”. Heck the ban on pot hasn’t been “A failure” to the extent that it’s a viable policy: it just comes at rather substantial social cost.
My claim: If Marijuana is legalized its use will be widespread and existing social stigma (such as it is) will evaporate.
Marley23: This still needs a cite.
Response: I like this angle better. Downgrade my comment to “Plausible speculation”, since I don’t have a good handle on how one would seriously address this question. Also, I’m frankly not interested in this topic enough. Oh yeah, and change “evaporate” to “substantially decrease”.
----- What makes you think, with the permanently crippled public image they have, that they could lobby to have marijuana unregulated when unrelated cigarettes turned out the way they did?
Lightly regulated, not unregulated. It would be simple: they would only have to learn from their mistakes. The profits in the biz would be huge, so party-building donations could be rather generous. Furthermore, they could easily align themselves with an Astroturfed pot smokers group.
BTW: Regulatory capture (you can google it) is a not a novel theory.
Indeed. Even alcohol has social stigma attached to its inappropriate use, and inappropriate use is the only kind that should be stigmatized anyway.
That’s true of just about any product or activity imaginable.
So, outlaw Vicodin and all other prescription narcotics (not to mention Robitussin, nutmeg, and anything else that might be abused before class)? After all, a minor might find them in his parents’ medicine drawer, and those childproof caps won’t stop a 10 year old, let alone a teenager.
Skiing isn’t a drug
True, but irrelevant unless you can explain why something that goes into the body needs to be regulated so much more strictly than something the body goes into.
It doesn’t cause car wrecks
You could veer off course and hit someone, particularly if you’re skiing at a park or on a snowy street instead of a designated mountain. And of course you have to drive on icy roads to get to wherever you’re skiing, which is much more likely to cause an accident than driving someplace warm.
It isn’t addictive
Any thrilling experience can be addictive: gambling, shopping, sex, or extreme sports.
It doesn’t result in major injuries in the grand majority of all cases
Neither does pot or most other drugs.
It is exercise
There are much less dangerous ways to get exercise.
It is fun experience for the whole family
So is pot, for a slightly smaller subset of the family.
It is a way to meet people in a fun and healthy environment
So is pot.
If you don’t learn how to ski, you’re going to be screwed when the next ice age occurs
If you don’t learn to breathe pot smoke, you’re going to be screwed when Jerry Garcia rises from the grave and transforms all the world’s oxygen into THC.
It’s not that hard. IIRC, Ecstasy was legal for a short time, before it became illegal. Same for LSD. But neither drug was socialized like alcohol, nicotine and caffeine is in the US and marijuana is in India.
Um, no. The prohibition on LSD today is far more effective than the prohibition on alcohol was in the 1920s. Heck, I’d maintain that today’s marijuana prohibition is more effective than 1920s prohibition, though a serious historical comparison might be interesting.
Better argument, but no. We could try decriminalization, for example. Furthermore, the relevant metric is comparative harms, not whether somebody has tried a drug once (or more) in their lives: “trying” doesn’t indicate dosage.
Summary: I think this is a better line of attack, frankly, but it needs to be fleshed out.
IMHO, those who maintain that marijuana legalization won’t lead to higher marijuana usage over, say, a ten year period are in deep denial.
However. I also acknowledge that this is a matter of some controversy.
Furthermore, one could agree that legalization would lead to higher usage and reasonably respond with a resounding, “So what?” The harms from higher usage might plausibly be offset by other benefits. Or not.
On preview
I didn’t say that pot wasn’t causing harm. I’m simply evading areas, such as the medical effects of pot, where I lack knowledge.
Ultimately, some sort of benefit / cost analysis is called for. Rather than go into that, I’m simply bringing up the irreversibility and regulatory capture contentions.
Any use of medication when you’re not ill and where that is not the proper medication, is misuse. People don’t go skiing in the middle of the summer, but they do pop pills just because it’s an easy way out, because they would rather their headache medicine will make that ache in their stomache go away instead of checking with the doctor to see if it is cancer, etc.
Some drugs which were available were later revoked because for whatever reason that particular one gained popularity for misuse, as I understand it. If the FDA decided that it was no worse than nutmeg, go ahead. If people abuse that trust, remove it.
Because medications, chemicals, etc. tend to be a lot more insidious. You might drink saccharine for twenty years just to find out that constant usage of saccharine causes horrible, painful cancer that kills really, really slow.
You might get addicted, which means that the decision to stop becomes much less of a decision.
You might abuse the drug to keep you high throughout class, which you find dull, and ruin the rest of your life. You can’t go skiing in the middle of class, nor are most likely to do this on a daily basis–particularly not without getting caught.
Cite?
They aren’t mind-altering drugs. And dependent on your definition of addiction, all or none of the above are, including marijuana. Caffeine is addictive, marijuana (apparently) is not.
40% of all major automobile accidents are a result of alcohol. Do you think that number will grow or shrink when someone is smoking marijuana and drinking?
Skiing is dangerous? I would be fairly certain more people are wounded by weight machines in a year than are hurt while skiing. (Guess)
That I have ever been able to tell, the only bonding part of people sitting about doing weed is the fact that they’re all doing something illegal together. But once they’re all high, “Dooood, heh.”
Drugs are mostly a matter of escaping the world and society, not getting more into it–like women going to the bathroom together. Sure they all go into the room together, but once they’re in their own stalls, it stops being a social activity (one hopes.)
Getting stoned on your mom’s vicodin is a way to meet people in a fun and healthy environment?
And you can pick up smoking if you want to meet people through what unhealthy products you want to put in your body–or even start hanging out at the local McDonalds. Adding marijuana to the mix just gives people a new unhealthy thing to do together on top of all the old ones that will still be there.
IF they play by the existing laws (a huge IF, in these post-ephedra days), the FDA will have nothing at all to do with the approval of pot because it is not a “drug” in the pharmaceutical sense, nor is it edible as “food”. Marijuana would, if all it right with the world and the FDA plays by its own rules, fall under DSHEA, along with Saint John’s Wort and Vitamin C. These “supplements” are non or minimally processed vegetable or animal stuffs or vitamins or minerals which cannot make health claims, and are sold in quantities or packaging which do not present themselves as food.
The reason this is important is that the burden is on the FDA to show that the supplement is harmful, NOT on the packagers to show that they are harmless and/or effective.
If, on the other hand, THC is extracted and concentrated to a certain degree through a lab process or synthesized in a lab, then we’re talking a pharmaceutical drug, and the FDA would have to see testing which shows it to be safe and effective for treating something, at least 30% of the time.
Of course, even pot’s few detractors in this thread have yet to link us to studies showing the harm of marijuana, so we’re back 'round the circle.
Irreversibility. So you’re saying if we make it legal, we can’t make it illegal? Why ever not? Because people might like it and not want to make it illegal? Er…isn’t that what a representational democracy is sort of about? Enacting laws that reflect the will of the people?
As for regulatory capture, I did google it, and got this on the first hit:
(bolding mine) shrugs
mmm…OK, I’m good with that risk. Yeah, it *might *bring us around to a similar place as tobacco - that is, Big Marijuana might become powerful enough to influence politics. Maybe. I doubt that as many people will ever smoke pot as smoke tobacco, per the studies already linked. But, even so, who cares? The problem with Big Tobacco is that it’s hiding (or has hidden, in the past) health hazards due to its highly addictive product. If no health hazards have been found in very anti-pot days like the last fifty years, I’m inclined to say there aren’t any, or aren’t any significant ones. And, while anything can be psychologically addictive, marijuana has been clearly shown to not be physically addictive - so it’s no more dangerous than shoe shopping, in that sense.
'Sides, “most economists” don’t think it’s that much of a threat. So we keep an eye on it, and that’s that.
And even if it does, what’s the harm? It just might be a better world if more people toked up and relaxed. As far as the FOAF who got paranoid on the first hit, those people won’t be forced to smoke, you know. If you don’t like it, don’t smoke it. But not liking it is not a good enough reason for our society to be wasting so much money on fighting a mostly harmless recreational activity.
You can’t get high in the middle of class without getting caught, nor can you come to class high every day without getting caught unless no one is trying to catch you. It isn’t that hard to notice, and most people won’t want to do it every day anyway. It’s no fun being high in a room full of sober people and trying to act normal.
Furthermore, failing to pay attention in class won’t ruin the rest of your life. At the worst you’ll have to repeat a few courses.
For the possibility of skiiers hitting people, or the dangers of winter driving? I have no cite. Is “Howdy” the name of a tropical island where the temperature never drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit?
Shift the goalposts much? :rolleyes:
You said it wasn’t addictive. You were wrong. Something doesn’t have to be a mind-altering drug to be addictive.
That number already includes the accidents where marijuana was also present. I don’t think the legalization of pot would make combined DUI more likely than it is now, but it is something to watch out for.
12,000 to 16,000 skiiers and snowboarders suffer head injuries every year (cite). One doctor estimates 250,000 broken bones and torn ligaments annually (cite). Any idea how many injuries are caused by weight machines?
And how much experience do you have with that? Could it be that you just know a few boring stoners?
While it’s true that some drugs cause the user to withdraw from the world and other people, marijuana does only slightly, and other drugs have the opposite effect (e.g. ecstasy). Think of going to the movies with your friends - even though you’re not focused on each other, and you have your own thoughts and interpretations of the movie, it’s still a shared experience.
This is an example of erroneous equation of two distinct concepts that happen to bear the same label, e.g.:
In this case, the two distinct concepts labeled “criminalization” are:
The procedural mechanics of enacting a statute.
The surveillance, arrest, judgment, and incarceration mechanics of enforcing the law.
I must ask you to indicate which of the two you mean*, and apply it consistently to both cases (alcohol/tobacco and marijuana).
*If I were being uncharitable, I would simply assume that you’ve already picked #1 ("…it’s already been done." clearly applies only to that option) and snidely ask what “practical problems” you are inferring. All the legislators have been stricken with laryngitis? Nobody can find a pen that works? The powers that be have decided that August isn’t enough, and are vacationing all year round?)
I’ve got a bunch of money in my pocket. Some guy advocates that this be changed (that the money be taxed away to pay cops to go looking for The Demon Weed With Roots In Hell[tm]). I await his efforts to meet his burden of proof.
The practical problems in criminalizing alcohol and tobacco refer to the wide array of lobbying forces poised to offset such a move. Practically speaking, these substances cannot and will not be outlawed.
The practical problems in criminalizing marijuana do not exist. It has already been done. The laws are signed and in effect.
Keep waiting. Let me know how that works out for you.
Meanwhile, come tax time, the EXISTING laws will cause some of that money in your pocket to be taken away and the EXISTING federal, state, and local budgets that receive that money will continue to fund their EXISTING programs to eradicate the Demon Weed.
