October 30, 2009

8 Reasons To Legalize Marijuana You’ve Already Heard

By wise sloth

Graphic of a green, black and white American flag, with a large outline of a marijuana leaf in the middle

1: Freedom

This conversation should really be over after that one word. How are you going to argue with freedom? But people do. Just don’t tell me we live in a free country when I’m not free to grow a plant and consume it in the privacy of my own home. Freedom doesn’t get much more basic than growing a plant. And if we don’t have that simple freedom and we take it for granted that simple freedoms like that are okay to take away then we set a precedent for any other rights to be taken away. All the government needs now is a good sounding reason. A vote against legalizing marijuana is a vote against your children’s freedoms.

 

2: Reduce organized crime

Look at what happened in Chicago during prohibition. Politicians made alcohol illegal despite the wishes of the majority of the people. If you think of dollars as votes and cash registers as ballot boxes you’ll see that people voted for alcohol with their dollars. Unfortunately, since alcohol was illegal the only people you could get it from were criminals. And being criminals they did other illegal things to keep their business running, like killing people. Do liquor store owners today kill each other? No. Do people selling weed today kill each other? Yes. Do innocent people get caught in the crossfire? Yes. Do the owners of “coffee shops” in Holland that sell weed kill each other? No. Legalizing marijuana will put criminals out of business. Then they’ll have to get jobs.

 

3: Drug laws hurt people more than protect them

This is the warped logic of the laws. Using marijuana will destroy your life. Therefore, it’s illegal, and if you get caught using it then in order to protect you from yourself you’ll be thrown in jail, which will cause you to lose your job. You’ll be slapped with a huge fine that you won’t be able to pay because you lost your job, and you’ll get a criminal record equal to shooting or raping someone that will guarantee you never get a good job again. And you’ll probably get your ass kicked, raped, and possibly killed while in jail. So basically, the government protects you from destroying your life by destroying it for you far worse than smoking marijuana could have. Oh, and by the way, everybody knows that there are millions of people who smoke weed every day and live productive, not destroyed lives…until they’re arrested. So the government isn’t actually saving you by destroying you. It’s just destroying you.

 

4: Reduce stress that leads to hard drug use

That would be a good argument if it were true. The reason people use drugs is because their lives suck. That’s the real gateway. Legalizing marijuana would make life suck less. Therefore it would actually reduce hard drug use. Plus, who do people get hard drugs from? The same criminals they buy their weed from. If people didn’t need to buy weed from criminals then they’d never meet said criminals to know where to buy the hard drugs from. If marijuana were legalized, we’d probably see a drop in hard drug use.

5: The precedent has already been set

Morally there’s no difference between drinking alcohol and smoking or eating marijuana. The effects are slightly different, but the morality isn’t. If we can have one we should be able to have the other. Anything less is hypocrisy.

 

6: Reduce overcrowding in prisons

All across America right now there are ex-con rapists, thieves, murderers, and brawlers going about their business in quiet little neighborhoods like yours raping, stealing, murdering, and fighting when they should still be in prison. You know why they’re not in prison? Because the prisons are overcrowded with potheads who are guilty of victimless crimes. That’s how sick in the head America is. We can actually say the contradictory nonsensical meaningless phrase “victimless crime” with a straight face and pretend like it means anything less than, “You don’t live in a free country.” Let me tell you about a crime that has real victims. It’s a crime that the government and the police force allow real criminals to get out of jail early to hurt more innocent people. Plus, if the penalties for real crimes are lowered across the board because the prisons are full of pot heads then there’s less incentive for real criminals to obey the law. Let’s rob this gas station. Fuck it. If we get caught we’ll only do two years. Good thing there are too many potheads in jail. Otherwise, we might have to serve a real term that would actually discourage us from robbing this gas station. Ha ha ha.

 

7: Increase funding for addiction treatment

Someone once said that the war on drugs took a minor medical problem and turned it into a major legal one. How much money has the war on drugs cost the American taxpayers? We know the government lost that war. Even the government admits it. So how about we just legalize everything, give people the freedom to screw up their own lives if they want, and take all the money we’re flushing down the toilet fighting victimless criminals and spend that money on medical treatment for these people with a medical problem. Is there anyway possible that could work worse than what we’re doing right now?

8: Reduce wasteful government spending

Still not convinced? Still think marijuana should be illegal? Fine. But you’re going to pay for it literally. The potholes on your street aren’t going to get fixed. Your children’s school isn’t going to get new textbooks. Your public library is going to be closed. And your taxes are going to go up to build that big new prison on the outskirts of town. So you don’t like the idea of hippies getting stoned at concerts. Fine. I don’t like kids on my lawn. But I don’t think we should spend billions of tax dollars on a war on kids on my lawn when that money could be used for education. Shit. Just end the war on drugs and give the money back to the people. We’re fucking poor. We need money more than we need the kid who lives across the street from me not smoking out on his roof after his parents go to bed. If I paid you $10,000 would you support legalizing weed? I think most people would. Well, if marijuana were legalized and taxed we’d probably all see more than $10,000 in some form or another from the increased tax revenue and decreased need for taxation.

I think we should let children run our government. They call it like it is. If a lobbyist came up to a kid and said, “Instead of medically treating people with medical substance abuse problems let’s take away their jobs, give them a criminal record, lock them up with real criminals for a long time, and let the real criminals go free. At the same time, we’ll spend trillions of dollars in a futile attempt to cut off the supply and demand of the goods the people are voting for with their dollars and having huge protests about every year. And as long as we allow the war that we created to go on people will needlessly get hurt and killed by competing drug cartels.” Only an adult could have an idea that stupid and commit trillions of dollars and millions of lives to perpetuating this cancerous, destructive plan. Any child could see how retarded that plan is and how seriously, really, in real life hurting real people. And since children are going to have to live in the world we create they might pass laws that will take care of themselves in the future. Whereas currently, we make laws that fuck over our children’s future because fuck it. Our kids are going to have to deal with most of the consequences, not us.

 

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 4:34 am and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , and posted in American Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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