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Smoking marijuana is trivial and that's why I took the discussion to a wider perspective. This relates to virtually every type of harm that can be inflicted on one person from another. If you think you have been harmed by Bob take Bob to court before an impartial jury and do your best to convince the jury that Bob harmed you. You do that in order to get restitution for your pain and suffering that Bob inflicted on you.

You can take Bob to court regardless of his actions so long as you think his actions caused you harm. His actions may be that he punched you in the face, or he stole your car, or broke into your house, or sat on his porch and drank a beer, or sat on his porch and smoked pot, or called you a nazi pinko fagot.. If Bob harmed you you have every right to take him to court.

You don't need laws prohibiting each one of those acts. If Bob has it in his mind to do any of those acts he will do them regardless of the laws. As we have seen violent criminals don't abide gun-control laws. People that smoke pot don't abide marijuana prohibition laws. Nor did people abide alcohol prohibition laws. So the real issue is for you to gain restitution via an impartial jury awarding you damages.

With all the people that smoke marijuana society has not run headlong into destruction as parasitical elites proclaimed it would. Society wasn't headed for destruction before marijuana prohibition Yet the drug gangs turf wars and non-violent drug offenders sitting in jail and their broken families is the destruction caused by marijuana prohibition.

Taking people to court is an effective remedy for a large class of harms, provided that the defendant is available and solvent, your claim is legally sound, you can afford a lawyer, the judge and jury and laws are honest in concept and result, you are willing and able to devote time and effort to pursuing your claim, and the size of your claim in money terms is worth it. Otherwise, to one degree or another, you are screwed.

There is also a large class of problems for which it is better in practical terms to regulate dangerous and destructive conduct before it imposes irreversible harm. Thus speeding is illegal even before there is an accident; the competence of doctors and airline pilots is regulated; you cannot store dynamite in your tool shed in the burbs; and so on. Even the mere disturbance of your enjoyment of your home is defended by regulations against your neighbors putting on a rock concert down the block.

Many of these things are done today by the government as a matter of regulation instead of by private legal action, but they build on common law tort and nuisance actions. Done properly, the net cost to the whole of society is less than a constant torrent of private lawsuits. Besides which, most people would rather have their kid alive than a private cause of action for damages against their speeding neighbor.

There is yet another class of harms in which the conduct at issue is destructive or costly to others in a way that is not fully rational or amenable to redress through damages actions or injunctive relief. What do you do for the kid who wonders why his father tells him to piss off through a cloud of smoke on many evenings? Or is glassy eyed and barely responsive? Or who just acts odd and has trouble working because of damage done long ago by drug use?

What about the doctor who operates with a buzz on? The pilot who flies that way? What about the costs for hospitalization and institutionalization of those who are schizophrenic and psychotic due to marijuana or other drugs? In such cases private causes of action are a poor or useless remedy even if a solvent, deep pocket defendant is within reach.

And to contrive a system of tort law that offered an effective system of remedies -- against drug dealers and suppliers one supposes -- would still require massive help from law enforcement in order to be made effective. Why wouldn't drug dealers just operate in the shadows beyond view of the law -- just like the millions of illegal immigrants who live off the books and work for less than minimum wage?

To be sure, criminalizing marijuana and other drugs has its own costs, policy hazards, and drawbacks, but the settled view of most societies is that the net balance is against legalizing marijuana. The case for legalization cannot be made by asserting that the tort system is the cure for the economic and social harms of marijuana.

Indeed, close acquaintance with the role of marijuana in such harms and the inadequacy of other measures is the most potent reason why the American public has not embraced legalization. Whatever else we differ on, I think that we both agree that decades after "Reefer Madness," Americans know quite a lot about marijuana through experience in one form and another.