“Apart from that, drug usage is an activity that constitutes a reckless endangerment to the public.”
Well it CAN constitute, but that doesn’t mean it always or even usually does constitute such a danger. For example, a guy sitting in his boxer shorts eating cereal and smoking a bong while he watches cartoons on a Saturday morning doesn’t constitute any such danger.
If just the possibly of constituting a danger is enough, then we aught to ban alcohol as well. All those six packs sitting in fridges across the US could be ticking time bombs.
If just the possibly of constituting a danger is enough, then we aught to ban alcohol as well. All those six packs sitting in fridges across the US could be ticking time bombs.
More so than you may realize. In my family there has been a long association between tragedy and alcohol. The stuff kills 100,000 people per year, and is in reality more dangerous than is pot. We did try banning it, but humanity has a many thousand year old history with the stuff, and the effort to get rid of it did not reckon with how ingrained it was within some societies.
Be that as it may, Marijuana is not harmless. I know several people who are just worthless slugs because all they want to do is get high. Marijuana seemingly renders some portion of the population useless to themselves and as a result, usually needing the support of society. (As with the pot smokers I know.)
Presumably there are some people who can smoke the stuff AND maintain a functional lifestyle, and for such people as these I see no larger problem for society. However, we make laws that apply to everybody, and we cannot accept the principle that laws should apply to some one way, and to others a different way. The conclusion is, if some significant portion of the population cannot use something responsibly, we either have to ban it for everyone, or somehow license it to people who will not misuse it.
That is the situation in a nutshell.