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Originally Posted by romansh  Quote:
Originally Posted by GX ..... too unmotivated to work and therefore will go on welfare? From what I heard, welfare has been reformed.
What health costs? How does marijuana intoxication make one ill?
GX | Hi GX ..... I don't have all the answers...... but I have seen people go off the rails.....would it have happened without the cannabis...quite possibly? Regarding your comment about welfare reform ..... I'm thinking more internationally. Whether someone can collect the dole or not there is a social cost.
Regarding the specifics of the sterotype and how many puffs one needs etc., I will leave up to you as I suspect you have a greater in depth knowledge than I 
regarding health effects .....less than two minutes of searching at my favourite magazine: New Scientist. toxic and mental illness
I'm not suggesting these are good enough reasons to be for or against legalization. Just trying to be a little more evidence based |
A valid response which I would like to address. First of all I read both of those studies and I grant you the evidence regarding the toxicity of the smoke but there are alternatives to smoking it and you don’t smoke it as much as you do cigarettes so the lung damage is negligible to non-existent. As far as the mental illness is concerned, I read that report and it is just a theory and there is no direct causal link there. In other words it is inconclusive.
Now lets get back to the social costs. Pot is out there whether it’s legal or not along with all of its “social costs” and its not going to go away if you enact laws. You have to ask yourself whether the social costs of its illegality outweigh the social costs of its legality. How about you giving me the social costs of its legality while I will list the social costs of its illegality which
follows and we can compare which social costs are higher (no pun intended):
1) Minors have easy access to pot because of its illegality. This would change if you were to make pot legal. If so, it would be just as difficult for a 12 year old to score pot as it would for them to score beer.
2) The strength is not regulated (currently the stuff out there is moonshine grade, if legal, you can make it “beer and wine” grade). This is important in the case of parental use. If parents are using a weak grade that gives them a controllable pleasant intoxication as opposed to a “zombified incoherent” high they get smoking the illegal moonshine grade stuff, they are just as in control of their home situation as if they were to have a few alcoholic drinks.
3) The proliferation of violent drug dealing street gangs and jail overcrowding of non-violent “drug criminals” exacts quite a high social cost
4) The robbing of our civil liberties in the name of “protecting our children” from drugs exacts a high social cost (see point one on how to best protect the children)
5) Holland and switzerland has done it without any impact whatsoever on social costs. As a matter of fact, adolescent use in those countries is less than what it is in the countries where it is illegal
And finally, we as a nation are spending 50 billion dollars a year (law enforcement and incarceration etc.) for the “war on some drugs”. If you take marijuana out of the picture (make it legal) that would leave you with the truly dangerous hard drugs and the number of illegal users of hard drugs numbers at 3 million. In other words, we are spending 50 billion dollars a year to keep 3 million people in line. Lets legalize pot and spend this 50 billion dollars on education and the treatment of people addicted to hard drugs. Im sure treatment and education would cost less than 50 billion. Drug abuse is a medical issue not a legal one.