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Unfortunately, the NYT paywall prevents me from reading this article.
My feeling is that it is not a big mistake, but a move in the right direction. It's a good thing that a simple pleasure no longer results in a life ruined by the US "justice system" as we've seen since 1970. Whatever the externalities are, they are better than treating people as criminals for a victimless crime.
Where I am in Maryland, it became legal for recreational use about 2 weeks ago. There are also degrees of legality in nearby Washington DC and Virginia. The voters of these states decided it.
Taking cannabis is the users mistake to make.
Having an abortion is the woman's mistake to make.
In fact, doing X to Y's own body is Y's mistake to make.
Suddenly a whole class of distracting political questions vanish.
IF you replace "mistake" with "choice" I would agree with you completely.
Something what might be terrible for you might be wonderful for someone else. I would actually go so far as to say that we decriminalize all drugs.
I say that as a non-user of "drugs", as in, heroin/cocaine/lsd, the kind of stuff they taught us about in DARE. If you or someone else wants to become a cokehead or a heroin addict, then you should have a method and a path to do so that allows for the safest way to do that with the least amount of life-damaging consequence possible for you.
Would legalizing heroin turn the world into an opium den full of depravity? No.
It used to be legal in America and was even sold as a cough syrup that also came with a healthy dose of marijuana and cocaine, and America did not suddenly become or stop being anything other than what it was.
Some things are going to be done by people no matter what barriers are put into place to stop them. Murderers murder. Alcoholics get DUIs, and even with cigarettes costing $10 a pack poor people still smoke them.
If you accept that as a universal rule you can then pivot to find methods to take as much harm out of the inevitability of the event as possible, not only for the person doing the event but also for the people caught in their wake.
For instance, the illegalization of marijuana has caused hundreds of thousands of children to grow up whose fathers are in prison for the non-violent offense of getting high, and has caused even more poor children to grow up in households where their funds were taxed by the harrowing expenses of probation and having a parent who would be automatically excluded from the majority of good paying jobs for the crime of consuming a plant that the second worst president in human history, Richard Nixon, didn't approve of.
Those are social costs that we all have to pay every single day, that is the world our grandparents left for us. Legalizing marijuana and other drugs would put an abrupt end to that social tax, and even though the consequences will continue to be felt for generations, if we stop re-filling the bucket then eventually it will empty, and wouldn't that be a sight worth working towards seeing?
I call it a mistake not because disagree necessarily but that making unwise decisions is the lynchpin of liberty.
They're only possible to dismiss as "distracting political questions" if you buy into a political framework that sees personal freedom as the default, and exceptions requiring justification. If you instead frame the neutral state as "Everybody does the exact best thing", with personal freedom being the exception requiring justification, it leads to an entirely different worldview. And then that side of reasoning fractalizes based around what the exact best thing is.
Applying libertarian (left or right) axioms when trying to understand the reasoning of authoritarians simply does not work.
I think there is a fairly reasonable argument to be made that they are distracting because there are more pressing practical problems facing society, such as climate change, national security concerns, etc.
I am quite surprised by how in the last 20 years libertarian has become a dirty word.
I have found that people adopting the term "libertarian" is commonly associated with attitudes like "I get to do what I want to do, and the rest of you are on your own." Such people often seem to make common cause with authoritarians: they'll sacrifice other people's liberties in order to ensure their own.
This is not my understanding of libertarian philosophy, but I've heard many self-described libertarians seeming to endorse it. I believe that's why "libertarian" has become a dirty word, to the many people who would find themselves worse off in a world that has lots of liberty for a specific set of people, but less for many others.
Victimless crime? Smoking causes 8 millions death per year, 1 million for non-smokers around smokers. Alcohols causes 3 million deaths per year. They kill more people than COVID. That's not counting the disease and other crimes caused by these so-called recreational substances.
If your argument is that you have absolute freedom to consume whatever pleasures you, then all drugs should be legalized like fentanyl and when the society crumbles with drug addicts dying on every street, it is already too late to stop.
Marijuana does not cause death. Pretty disingenuous of you to slot in numbers for tobacco smoking. It's also disingenuous to act as though the assertion that marijuana should be legalized because it is a relatively benign compound necessarily entails that other substances whose effects on the user are drastically different--and well-known to be so--must or should also be legalized.
That's not 100% accurate. Even though Marijuana is believed to be a cancer-fighting compound, when smoked it may have similar or even greater cancer-causing effects as tobacco does due to in many cases having more tars than cigarette tobacco does.
However, the jury is still out, and there is the issue where unless you're Willie Nelson you aren't exactly chain smoking joints the way your average hardcore cigarette smoker does, so even if marijuana is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco, being exposed to a lower dose may mitigate that to enough of an extent as to make it a rounding error.
Either way, you are more likely to be killed in a dispute over marijuana than you are by marijuana consumption itself.
This comment thread seems to be getting out of touch with reality. Marijuana use via smoking has been declining relative to vaporization and consumption of edibles. Rather than complications of smoking, I'd say the biggest risks are inexperienced users consuming way too much in one session and not being able to handle it. I don't know what young people are being taught now, but I hope drug education programs create the understanding that too much THC in the system is incompatible with operating heavy machinery, driving, anything risky, etc.
> That's not 100% accurate. Even though Marijuana is believed to be a cancer-fighting compound, when smoked it may have similar or even greater cancer-causing effects as tobacco does due to in many cases having more tars than cigarette tobacco does.
No doubt that if you're smoking a blunt or a joint, it's not good for your lungs. But the person to whom I was replying attributed millions of deaths annually to "smoking", implying that smoking weed was to blame.
The UCLA study definitively showed that cannabis use isn’t associated with increased risk of cancer:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-study-finds...
It’s hard to say exactly why, but it is reality.
The author, with remarkable transparency, dismisses out-of-hand the idea that people ought to be free by default, treating the idea as a fringe libertarian belief, rather than one of the key foundational philosophies of the United States.
Basically, his argument boils down to "Cannabis legalization didn't have as positive an impact as promised, so it should be made illegal again". Before aggressively cherry picking sources to back his point, he even complains about the portrayal of his (minority) opinion as being held exclusively by stodgy, stuck-up old men, before going on a stodgy, old-man rant about kids these days.