frogza

Personally I think taking any nonpresecription drug is simply an act of foolishness. You can't tell me that a person can operate at 100% when under the influence of drugs like alchohol, pot, nicotine or any other drug out there. Making the choice to limit your faculties, even briefly, all for a temporary thrill or escape just doesn't make sense to me at all. Life is hard enough when operating at 100%, I won't cut my "making it" margin by using substances that cut my ability.

There are several arguments for legalization that have been and will be presented, from what I've seen and heard they boil down to:

1. Since marijuana isn't as harmful as Cigarettes or alchohol, it should be ok to do.

This argument is fundamentaly flawed. It simply can't be backed up by logic, but only by emotional thought. If you apply the "logic" of this statement to most anything else the silliness of it becomes apparent. For example, Since jumping off a 20 foot wall isn't as bad as jumping off a 50 foot wall, I should go ahead and jump off.

2. Legalizing would eliminate the black market for it and the associated crime.

People who have established a habit of working "behind the man's back" will continue to do so, until forced to quit. I realize that is a generality, I state it because it is the general pattern. There will be exceptions, but they will be just that, the exceptions. The price to purchase black market pot will likely be lower than purchasing the governmennt endorsed pot, simply because there will be lower overhead.

3. Our prisons are filled with drug users, and we're turning violent criminals loose since there isn't room for them in the prison system.

This is the only argument that resonates at all with me. I feel it is counter productive and counter intuitive to sentence a drug user to a longer term than say a rapist. It also seems counter productive to start eliminating laws to fix the prison cell shortage. Ideally we would eliminate the need for so many cells by getting people to stop doing illegal things. Unfortunately we don't live in the ideal world and I for one don't know how to get us there. The idea of eliminating laws seems like a slippery slope to me and therefore scares me.

Edit:
4. The government has no right to tell me what I can and can't do in my own home.

The government is called such because it's duty is to govern, or in other words, tell us what we can and can't do. We establish governments to tell our community what they can and can't do, even in their own homes. If the majority voice calls for limitations on what we can and can't do, then it is the duty of every government branch to enforce those limitations. There are some types of actions that, as a people, we have allowed full rein. In those situations the government does not have the right to influence us.