Legalize It (Don't Criticize It)

When I was in 11th grade, a few of my fellow classmates did a project in health on the legalization of marijuana.  They, of course, played the compelling Bob Marley song, as captioned above.  It repeats that phrase over and over…and over and over.  I'm sold, where do I sign up to give my tax dollars?

So California, probably the only entity that could eventually rival the US in total debt, just shot down a bill to legalize marijuana.  I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that any time your best argument for legalization of a banned substance is talking about deplorable legal substances (i.e. cigarettes and alcohol), you automatically lose.  And you get put in time out for the next voting cycle.

Look, I think that marijuana to some degree needs to be decriminalized - our legal system doesn't need to be flooded with offenders like these (fine em or community service or something, I really don't care).  But the fact is that, when one argues for the legality of marijuana because "alcohol and tobacco kill a lot of people," you just sound uneducated.  Because you don't really care about the amount of people who die as a result of alcohol and tobacco.  If you did, you wouldn't be campaigning for the legalization of pot, but rather the criminalization of booze and cigarettes.  Tens of thousands of people die from drunk driving each year? We should definitely legalize pot then, we need to get our numbers up!  And while we're at it, let's legalize heroin, then our numbers will really skyrocket!

I'm not writing this because I'm necessarily anti-pot.  I frankly don't care. I don't do drugs, and it doesn't affect me in anyway.  But the style of argument used above is not only dangerous, but above all idiotic.  

And don't give me that crap about tax revenues from legalization.  First of all, legalization would require a ton of costs in regulation, and that's not even considering social costs, as alluded to above.  

When presenting an argument, your discussion should be centered around the benefits, not the blatant ignorance of all the costs, and the "there are worse things out there" mentality.