No, We Should Not Legalize Recreational Marijuana Use

And .. if any of your “friends” decide to pile on .. I’ll know for sure you are a drug user.

There's lies, and there's damn lies, and that's a damn lie.

Nice try of you to cast baseless aspersions, though. It certainly strengthens your compelling opinion...

The Revolution is ON!

Vote Trump!

The self-righteous Prohibitionist Mind, in all of its nanny-state glory, is a thing to behold! Forget about minimal government: that mentality requires an ever-expanding, Tyrannical State apparatus to enforce its Edicts.

Real conservative freedom is the freedom to become a drug addict. America isn't a free nation unless we can exercise our CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to be drug addicts. Don't let the NANNY STATE stop you from a lucrative career in drug peddling and dope addiction. It's what freedom is all about.

And, even if you stay only with the MJ, there is proven evidence that it does, over time, dull the brain’s ability to function. A drunk is equally impaired when operating a vehicle as a person on MJ.

I never argued otherwise. Absolutely, a chronic MJ user will have his wits dulled. A once or twice a week casual user? Maybe, maybe not. Alcohol also has negative effects both on the brain and the body.

Whether these things are true or not, when we're talking about the merits of legalization, is irrelevant. The true question is whether we, as Americans, think the government, especially the federal government, has the right and authority to tell grown citizens what they can and cannot ingest. You can't give the government that authority and still expect to have a free society, and that is one of the biggest lessons of the War on Drugs, as we watch one after another constitutional right trashed right in our faces. You can have a nanny state, or a free state, but not both.

Also, the entire concept of a "gateway drug" is nonsensical. There are people who are looking to get high as a means of self-medication or escape, and these people are going to use whatever drug is out there - alcohol, weed, meth, coke, whatever. When one drug stops working, they go to the next one. But the idea that a person would try something like heroin only BECAUSE they smoked pot, where they otherwise would never have thought to do it, is ridiculous. Those people were always going to get into the deep end of the pool; they just wanted to make their way through the shallow end first.

For whatever anecdotes are worth, I have known many life-long pot smokers and only have known ONE to get into harder drugs, and he only did that because he got addicted to Vicodin from a LEGAL prescription, and when the Vicodin stopped doing the job, he looked for other stuff. The others that I've known live normal productive lives and never got caught up in harder drugs. To them, smoking pot is like drinking a couple of beers after work. They don't have any desire to go any farther than that. Any one with half a brain knows there is a huge leap from weed to, say, heroin or cocaine, so that the idea that one goes from weed to heroin as some kind of smooth, seductive transition is ridiculous.

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