> The recreational use of cannabis is legalized in 11 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.
There is no metric for which marijuana does more harm than alcohol, yet alcohol is perfectly fine.
- Watch out there is a person half a block away texting while crossing the street
- Are you sure you can't go 5mph slower?
- There is a ball rolling down that driveway, a child may follow
- AAAhhhhhhh! Wooooooooooooaaaahhh!
- For every 50% increase in velocity we double our kinetic energy
Driving on weed sounds like pure hell.
I think you read past my statement and went directly to the outrage. And to vmception: No! Operating any form of dangerous equipment while less-capable than some threshold should be illegal.
Mormons would ban coffee if they could.
On the one hand, I have explicitly resigned from the LDS church. I think they engage in immoral practices and I can't in good conscience say I'm a member. On the other had, I was raised Mormon and my family goes back with the Mormons to the 1830s when the LDS church was founded (technically The Church of Jesus Christ, the original name) so to some degree it's a inseparable part of my identity. I try to split the difference in my life, but it gets messy sometimes.
I think abuse of any substance will have negative effects. But the casual use of one substance is clearly far more safer on the body and society than the other.
There is no regard for harm reduction logic in conservative politics that isn’t already part of the conservative platform. Guns? Sure, “if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns”. Drugs? Only the ones that are already legal. Safe injection sites? Enabling addicts. Abortion? Baby murder. Sex work? Sin and depravity. Acknowledging racism? Racist itself! Holding police accountable in any way? Riots and looting! Masks? I will literally make up fake science because real science is tyranny! My goodness.
Edit: of course there’s room for all of these in big-L Libertarian politics, but... the party has less significant sway in any red state I’m aware of (they’ve had more success in blue NM?), and at the membership level the party seems to be more successful in funneling angry white dudes into the alt right than convincing conservatives to actually care about personal liberties when those liberties might be shared by everyone and help reduce power disparities.
No one in the US is free to do whatever they want with cannabis.
Drugs challenge free will through addiction as well as influence on behavior ("under the influence").
Marijuana just got swept up in that whole idea, and ended up polarizing like everything else.
But even the most hardcore libertarian would hesitate to say it should be legal for 14 year olds to get meth or fentanyl at the corner store.
There's a big difference between illegal and "war on drugs"-illegal, though. Most small-government types would probably agree once you point out the kind of government apparatus that's built up around the war on drugs.