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Notes -
My argument against legalizing marijuana(yes, I know, you mean all drugs, but I’m arguing against the most politically favorable interpretation) rests on the following points-
1: occasional pot use by adults is probably not that bad. But daily use- which tracks way up under legalization- and adolescent use both appear very bad. With alcohol, we accept some frequency of both daily use and adolescent use(even if it’s de jure illegal) as the price for legalizing; I’m not in favor of doing the same for pot.
2: occasional pot use by adults is not that bad, but it’s still not a good thing that should be encouraged except perhaps by people suffering from incurable pain or something like that.
3: marijuana culture is bad and I don’t like it, and like it or not the aesthetics of a society really do influence it’s values and priorities. Other societies- including some which I neighbor- have proven entirely unable to prevent marijuana culture and it’s aesthetics from running rampant and taking over absolutely everything in environments of more permissive pot laws.
4: it smells bad and places like Colorado or NYC which have permissive regimes seem unable to moderate its use.
5: with the society we have, laws are rarely enforced to their maximum extent. Legalizing marijuana even with tight restrictions to curtail undesired/problem use is likely to result in those tight restrictions being ignored or evaded at very high rates because laws are not typically enforced maximally. Additionally, with marijuana in particular, we can expect big city prosecutors(that is, those in the sorts of places where most people live) to be highly sympathetic to marijuana use in a way that creates even more room to evade regulations.
Yes, a lot of them are individually rather weak reasons, but that’s why I listed five of them. To my conservative view authoritarianism isn’t an intrinsic evil; it’s something societies need less or more of depending on how they normally behave. 50’s America would have been fine with legal weed, modern day America isn’t.
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