[exDemMom]

Robbing banks is illegal, yet people still rob banks. So maybe we should just give up and make bank robbery legal.

You can’t use as a serious argument that crime is not stopped by making it illegal. The price of making it legal (in the name of saving money on cops, trials, prisons, etc.) is to greatly increase the activity, and increasing the amount of money society must spend to deal with the consequences.

My sense is that as the brain-damaging effects of marijuana become more documented and widely-known, this experiment with making it legal will end. I am beginning to think that Reefer Madness was not as over-the-top sensationalist as I thought when I first saw it, that it may actually be based on real observations of marijuana users.

[morphing libertarian]

Thax four anticipating my argument.

I’m with you let’s put them all in jail.

I see the analogy between using MJ and robbing a bank. Let’s increase our taxes and give these potheads the war on drugs they fear the most.

[Ken H]

Pot laws have dramatically loosened all across the US in the last 20 years, yet crime has plunged and highway death rates are at record lows.

CA, for example, defacto legalized when they voted for medical mj in 1996. Violent crime has fallen by half in CA since then.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/cacrime.htm

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year

[ConservingFreedom]

Robbing banks is illegal, yet people still rob banks.

Bank robberies are detected 100% of the time, potential victims take all manner of preventive measures beforehand, and actual victims cooperate in investigations afterward. The vast majority of illegal drug transactions go undetected, and those involved actively seek out those transactions and strive to avoid investigation. Laws against consensual acts are, by the nature of the act, doomed to futilty.

[PlasticMan]

I am beginning to think that Reefer Madness was not as over-the-top sensationalist as I thought when I first saw it, that it may actually be based on real observations of marijuana users.

That's like thinking that Plan Nine From Outer Space is based on real observations of space aliens.