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Two plugs I always make during any drug law discussion on HN:

One - The Economist's 2009 article "Failed states and failed policies" - http://www.economist.com/node/13237193 (you might have to Google the title to get around a paywall)

Two - The documentary, The House I Live In - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/ (trailer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8)

Both make such a fascinating case that drugs should have never been a crime and punishment issue, but rather one of public health. I highly recommend both for a read and a watch, and both will articulate the case far superior to anything I would be able to write here.

> a crime and punishment issue, but rather one of public health

Not disagreeing with anything you said, just providing a thought.

Common opinion dictates that we need the state to take care of public health; thus, in common opinion, public health is an issue of crime and punishment.

If you take it as a principle (as I do) that we need sepration of state and public health (as with church, as with education), it has interesting implications.

Update: Most glaring example is Obamacare. You have to pay a fine (punishment) if you don't get insurance and it imposes massive burdens on doctors. I am only adding this because I got massively downvoted. I guess people didn't understand that what I said was just a matter of fact. Our society does support the idea that public health is actionable on a "crime and punishment" level and in general that is still the modus operandi.

I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don't understand it's effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can't think of even one legitimate reason for it's prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.
I'll bring up a point here only because I feel like the HN crowd is on the younger side. Its not until your late 20's and really 30's that you start to find out about and see people you've known in the past that were intelligent, productive people who's lives have been completely destroyed due to their drug addictions. And yes, I've certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they were/are addicted to marijuana. It definitely happens, don't kid yourself.

I don't know if the correct solution is to criminalize it, but please keep in mind that drugs change who you are. That is truly the unique thing about them compared to other addictions. And again, if you think heavy marijuana use doesn't change a person, you don't know any heavy marijuana users.

For example, banning alcohol and marijuana probably isn't going to work, but selling bottles of cheap vodka at the grocery store 24/7 is setting up a lot of people who are trying to get clean to fail.

Legalize it,

But there are some real issues to be worked out, as someone who had a friend sent to hospital after being hit by a stoned driver who blew through a stop sign. Whats the legal limit?

I'm not sure how easy it is to detect if someone is "under the influence" as the drug is detectable for weeks in the blood (in this case the join was in the car).

I've heard anti legalisation advocates suggest that prohibition of alcohol would indeed be a positive thing and were alcohol a new drug then it should be criminalised. However prohibition attempts (of alcohol) are doomed to fail because of how much drinking is entwined with our culture. For example pubs or bars being focal points of the community, wine being a common meal accompaniment etc. Marijuana doesn't have the same culture built around it , except for a minority of stoners.
I was under the impression that tobacco and alcohol companies are against legalization and have the largest hand in keeping it illegal.
Is that an argument against legalization or an argument that there needs to be better access to treatments for addictions of any kind? Especially since throwing someone in prison doesn't exactly limit their access to drugs.
- Anybody in the black market is going to be against legalization

- How to deal with driving under the influence is not a question with a perfect answer yet

This is a step in the right direction. I strongly believe that marijuana legalization is good for the economy -- personally I've come up with brilliant, practical ideas while stoned[0]. Many of which I have gone on to implement and generate wealth. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Think Steve Jobs and Apple etc.

[0] I hope the nomenclature evolves re marijuana. "stoned", "bong", "skunk", "chronic", etc conjure up images that are too tightly aligned with negative stereotypes IMO.

We have plenty of negative names for alcohol and tobacco, though. Booze, fags, etc.
Not a user, but after being a bartender for years - and knowing many who do consume marijuana - there seems to be no logical reason to punish (let alone _incarcerate_) people for something which is ultimately less destructive than what I was allowed to push for so many years.
Yeah, alcohol is far more likely to result in police incidents. Here in Boulder I often think that if all the drunk college students were getting high instead, the worst thing that would happen is all the restaurants will get overrun at 2 am.
So the real question now becomes - which organizations with political clout are still fighting to keep Marijuana illegal?

I've actually never smoked weed in my entire life (seriously). I have no interest in smoking weed once it is legal either. But I'm very sick of paying to support a stupid wasteful policy. So who are the people that are actually fighting to keep it illegal? I honestly can't find them, I'd love to read their arguments.

Really? Illegal drugs are an enormous business, I'd guess the people currently making money from it would be fighting to keep it illegal. The same goes for the police/DEA/etc who are paid to enforce the law.
Here's an interesting report on these big-pharma funded groups:

http://thenation.com/article/180493-anti-pot-lobbys-big-bank...

To the Americans around here: do you think this will have any important effects? It seems to me it could have, if it had been done ten years ago, our if the NYT was a newspaper aligned with a more conservative line, but nowadays I'd expect most readers of the Times to think "took you long enough!"
I think this is a big deal. The New York Times is hardly universally respected, but it has a lot more credibility than the image normally associated with the marijuana legalization crowd. I would expect Sunday morning news programs to mention this editorial tomorrow.
Take someone like my mom, born in the 50's: she was raised in a conservative household, and when authority figures told her "marijuana is bad", her instinct was to believe them. So she's been against it her whole life. But I can tell she's kind of dubious about that position--the reality she's seen doesn't match the horrors she was warned against. But when you've held one position for so long it's kind of hard to change without losing a little face.

Having a respected media outlets come out and say they've rethought their position might give her cover to rethink her own position.

I'd expect most readers of the Times to think "took you long enough!"

The Times did not say anything here that wasn't known to be true 20 years ago. They just waited until it was a more popular thing to say. The Times would do well do understand why they were unable to write this editorial in 1994. What has changed except popular (uninformed and unscientific) perception?

General legalization and amnesty is the way to go. This piecemeal recreational legalization is only happening in the whitest states in the country, and not helping the primary victims of the drug war.
Keep your eye on DC. It is neither the "whitest" nor even a "state" but it does have a full legalization ballot initiative set for November that will almost certainly pass if Congress doesn't block it.
I can't use marijuana because it would have incredibly bad effects on my life, but I support legalization.

I tend to be bored easily. Normally boredom inspires me to get out of the house, do something productive, write some code, etc. Marijuana is a boredom cure. After using it, I could stare at a wall for five hours and be deeply fascinated and content. I cannot afford to waste time staring at walls. I need to be productive. Therefore marijuana is a bad idea for me, but I don't believe the state should make that decision for everybody.

Full legalization has a single major hurdle for me: testing for a person's level of "high". Think of this as a blood alcohol content breathalyzer test. There is a definite method for determining the amount of alcohol inside a person's body and laws use these limits for punishment.

This is highly important. No body wants someone "high as a kite" operating a vehicle. It is not in the public's best interest to have very high people driving just like having severely drunk people driving. Its all about safety.

You could frame the argument that marijuana is similar to other medicines (OTC or prescription, labeled with "do not drive or operate machinery") but the attempts to legalize marijuana for all uses - recreational - negates this point. If people can use marijuana at all times, any time, than a method of ensuring a using person is not endangering others is needed.

To sum, legalization requires a definitive method to measure "highness" to ensure safety for the public. Once this occurs and people know the rules and levels at which they can be high, then legalizing makes sense.

Why do you need to test a person's high? I don't care if a person has had too much to drink, too much to smoke, or taken to many prescription pills, if they are driving poorly under the influence of drugs, they should get a DUI. Having a test just makes the prosecutor's job easier, but the officer could always arrest the people he suspects are too high to drive and get a warrant for a blood draw.
I find it very unlikely that you've given this a thorough cost-benefit analysis. For one thing, automobiles were invented after alcohol but before breathalyzers, and we got along more or less just fine without having to put a bunch of people in jail for having alcohol. I see no reason why legal marijuana use would be much different.

Additionally, it's self-evidently not "all about safety". That's insane. If so, why let anyone drive at all? That's another option - there's no test for if you are driving tired, but that provides similar levels of driving impairment to alcohol, plus there's already quite a bit of illegal use of marijuana. If we ban all driving, no one can kill each other with cars, problem solved, and there are no safety implications here, because driving is not critical to your safety. Police, ambulances and firefighters can still use their vehicles, because safety is the only thing that is important.

I'm not sure why people are so terrified of drunk and high drivers. I've ridden my bicycle drunk and I've driven while tired and the latter was far far more dangerous. Old people and distracted soccer moms in SUVs are more dangerous than some guy who smoked a joint an hour ago IMO.
This is not an issue unaddressed:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/marijuana-dui-bill-...

Neat animation effect as your scroll down the page. Is it using SVG to animate the morph from star to cannabis leaf?
Yeah - Mike Bostock of the d3 fame works for the NYT and was almost certainly behind that
From the end of Part 1 of the editorial series:

> On Monday at 4:20 p.m. Eastern Time, Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, will be taking questions about marijuana legalization at facebook.com/nytimes.

At 4:20? Holy crap, I thought the NYT was way too stuffy to do such a stunt. I've been a reader for many years, and the only things I can count on in life are life, death, and the sleepy character of the NYT editorial page. I think I'd better pay closer attention.
Kind of off topic, but can we talk about how beautiful of a webpage that is?
I would have preferred the page-length banner to be to the right side of the article. I think it's easier to read when the left side is simple, so that you can track to the next line easily.
Ironically this comment is probably the only "on-topic" comment in this entire thread, considering that this is HN. :)
I'm truly curious: which problems related to marijuana use (intoxicated drivers, access by children, etc.) do people think might worsen in a state where marijuana is legalized?

It seems obvious to me that marijuana legalization would alleviate the two aforementioned issues by raising awareness of marijuana-related DUIs and eliminating distribution networks that sell to children, but I probably haven't considered other problems associated with widespread marijuana use.

I was really glad to see states starting to do something about this, but this should really be changed at the federal level. It's less bad for you than alcohol and cigarettes. The war on it is just so costly and absurd on so many levels.
I'm pretty neutral on marijuana legalization. If anything, I'm for it as I feel like it's a bit of a red herring for the media to discuss and ignore other, more important, issues.

That said, NYT, the morphing graphic of the stars in the US flag turning into pot leafs? That's just tasteless. Let's not go from illegal to "symbolizing our country" in one op-ed, eh?

> That said, NYT, the morphing graphic of the stars in the US flag turning into pot leafs?

I hadn't even noticed that, way to shoot their cause in the foot. What a silly, and disrespectful graphic. It doesn't even use the right values for blue and red before the morph. Granted, I take our flag pretty seriously, and personally can't stand it when people wear it as shirts or have some bastardization of it plastered on their mug.

Indeed. That is certainly tasteless. I have no strong opinion either way really. It certainly should be legal for medical purposes and any other use should be heavily regulated (especially where under age people are involved).
Even decades ago, people as influential as Milton Friedman were arguing this and explaining the costs at length:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLsCC0LZxkY&feature=youtu.be...

Is there any explanation why the editorial board of the Times is writing this now, after many decades of harm have already been done? Has something changed or do they just feel as if the bandwagon is big enough that it is OK for them to climb aboard?
And so does the National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379018/let-states-deci...
And in a decade or two, legalization of prostitution.
Nice XSS attack against the comment-page there. Oops.
I've lost many friends and family to drugs and alcohol. Tremendous loss. Most can use with no consequences, but not everyone. I believe legalization will result in more casualties.
> we advocate the prohibition of sales to people under 21.

What a fucking racists! The article started so well.