You really don’t get it, do you?
Marijuana and other drugs of abuse are not illegal because of the effects they have on the abusers. Who even cares about what the abusers do to themselves? They are illegal because of the cost to society of the abusers. The costs of abusers becoming unable to work and unable to support themselves, so they end up on welfare, begging in the streets, or committing crimes to pay for their next fix. The costs of sending them to rehab multiple times or sending them to prison. The cost to their victims that they kill or injure when they commit crimes to get the money to pay for their next fix, or when they simply attack people because the drugs have so addled their brains that they are driven to violence. These are enormous costs, and I dislike that I am paying them through taxes.
If drug abusers were as harmless as those who eat themselves up into the hundreds of pounds, and taxpayers weren’t having to pay for all of the collateral costs of drug abuse, few people would care about them drugging themselves into oblivion. But that is not the case.
If you are going to make claims like “It is 100% documented that...” you need to support them with reliable references from the medical literature.
I referenced a review of dozens of brain imaging studies that demonstrated many different effects of THC on several structures and functions of the brain; I even linked to the review so that you could read it for yourself. I found the review by doing a keyword search in the medical research database www.pubmed.gov; the database is public, and many of the references in the database link to openly available articles.
The direct and 100% PROVEN “cost to society” from all these legal things dwarfs the theoretical cost of some loose links found in imaging studies of handpicked individuals who claim they used cannabis. Nobody is having heart attacks, losing their liver and having strokes at age 40 from just pot. The magnitude and directness of the damage of these deadly legal things is miles above anything that is even remotely correlated to cannabis. Even if ALL the risks in the studies are calculated absolutely correctly, cannabis is STILL proven to be far less dangerous than all these things we can legally abuse.
Alcohol, tobacco and Rx drugs cost society 300% that of ALL illegal drugs combined. Ok, so lets ban all drugs and alcohol! Prohibition will work this time!
Oh wait. People abusing refined sugar costs us more than ALL drugs and alcohol combined. Ban sugar too!
Hey now. How much does people watching TV or reading FR “cost us”? Being sedentary is FAR more correlated to stroke and dimentia than pot ever will be. Time to put ankle monitors on everyone and make sure they’re not sitting around too much! Its the lazy bums’ fault they got sick and I’m not paying their medical bills!
Any other “costs” that we can cut?
https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics