Here’s my take on the arguments of reduction in use of legalization of marijuana versus alcohol: a weekend party pack of alcohol for you and all your friends is easy to interdict, because it’s several armloads of beer, or several bags of liquor. Contrast that to a weekend party pack of marijuana, which slips right into your pocket.

I agree that both substances are nobody’s business, and total legalization reduces abuse all around. I agree that the “tax and regulate” model is wrong, because it’s doneso much to stop teenagers from driving drunk. [insert eye-roll}

That is is the essential nature of marijuana and why the establishment fears it so — it is extremely easy to produce privately.

It certainly is a unique condition. What oh what would the ruling class do if the peasants could grow their own?

I don’t know what Iran is classified as. You might what to check with Obama’s Chief Diversity Officer.

Want to send the message that drawing a gun on a snowball fights is the wrong reaction? 60 days with no pay and require him to burn through any vacation he has banked before being allowed back.

Personally, the guy should be fired. Drawing a gun on what at its worst could be considered vandalism, assuming the snow ball actually damaged the Urban Assault Vehicle…er…Hummer is clear evidence that the guy does not have the disposition to be a cop.

The Denver Archdiocese has just shot themselves with both feet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-janssen/a-true-catholic-education_b_493509.html

And I’m surprised that DC detective is getting any disciplinary action at all. A previous commenter is right that he should be defending his suspension from a prison cell, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. Some pigs are more equal than others.

heroin would be much better off legalized, also. a batch that’s cut strong will wipe out a bunch of junkies in a weekend. hepatitis c is a nasty byproduct, also….

cocaine and meth should be easy to get, too. too many meth heads building meth labs in their water bed pedestals (or wherever) and burning their apartments, motel room, trailer, parents’ house, etc down to the ground.

we should be talking about legalizing and making POTENT recreational drugs safe- it’s a joke that we’re even debating whether marijuana should be legal or not. I guess dipping and lacing marijuana would be concerns, but I suspect that’ll go away with legalization.

I was in college right when the legal drinking age was going from 18 to 21, and we made almost exactly that argument then — they can raise the age for alcohol, but they can’t raise the age for pot.

Good points about the abominable “for the children” template for squashing liberty. Regardless of whether more or fewer children smoke pot, it is wrong to punish adults for growing, selling, buying, or using marijuana.

Also, it’s wrong to tax it, because the government isn’t actually contributing anything to the marijuana market and has no excuse to take a cut of the profits, other than it’s bigger than us and has lots of people with guns. After all, that’s just replacing the mafia-style mentality of getting a take of the black market because they’re more powerful than the other gangs who would like to operate in that neighborhood. Why is racketeering legal when done by office holders?

A year or two ago, I saw a documentary on Discovery or a similar network. There were police task forces dedicated to catching moonshiners. They displayed glee at being able to occasionally outsmart the scofflaws. They couldn’t argue that they did it “for the children” or that the drug being confiscated was horribly dangerous and not fit for consumption by anyone, because they could go to the nearest store and buy that same drug. It was almost surreal to see that going on in modern times. Are there task forces for hunting road-side produce vendors who don’t charge sales tax? Or, is it just the “vice” aspect that makes these people tick?

If politicians could figure out how to tax consensual sex between people not married to each other, they’d be sending out SWAT teams to execute no-knock warrants because, you know, the couple could have time to stop the copulation. Damn, I better shut up about this before I give anyone any ideas.

One more thing about “the children” argument. Again, appealing to consequences is not a justification for punishing grownups who aren’t doing anything wrong. That said, after a few years of marijuana being legally on the open market, I’d guess that the demand would trend more towards younger people. Getting very drunk or stoned loses its appeal for most people when their bodies get older and it takes longer to recover. Also, marijuana isn’t addictive like alcohol, nicotine, or narcotics. That’s all speculation on my part, of course. And, again, all moot with regards to the question of rights.

Lively discussion, but all it really proves is that none of us knows jack, myself included.

The only way we’ll know the effects on teenage American society is if marijuana is legalized, decriminalized, regulated, whatever, and then studied for years. And my hypothesis is that teen use would remain fairly constant, owing to ease of production.

This is why I revert back to first principles and rest comfortably knowing that if the first principles are sound for liberty, then the consequences are acceptable, regardless of anyone’s personal opinions.

It is the politicization of opinion, and its codification within the State, that causes the greatest harm. The War on Drugs, specifically marijuana, is among the greatest evidence for this I know of.

“I would expect a small but measurable uptick in teen reefer use were it made legal.”

There’s a difference between availability to children/teens and propensity of children/teens to use. There might indeed be some uptick in propensity to use among teens if marijuana were suddenly in the “legal” column. But there would still be a describable reduction in easy availability to teens. If pot were legal, most people would obtain theirs legally, in which case an age limit could be enforced; extralegal channels would wither, and home growing would decrease for lack of need. So access to marijuana without an age limit getting in your way would grow harder.

Back when I smoked pot in the late ’80s in southern New Mexico, there were a number of marijuana “droughts” – which I later discovered had never happened in the high school. Apparently the ease of networking from all the kids getting together in one big building had resulting in the teens vacuuming up all the pot. High school access exceeded adult access. The most you can say about the effect of cell phones and the Internet since then is that they may possibly have caused adult access to pot to come closer to equalling teen access! A legal regime would reverse this imbalance by making adults fairly reliable gatekeepers. You could call this result “unprovable” in a vague sense, because any illicit teen use would be covert, but it’s hard to see how it could be “outright false”.

I’m not saying not to legalize it. However to say that doing so would make it harder for kids to get seems rather far fetched.

http://www.kpvi.com/Global/story.asp?S=11003084