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As one who cherishes the Constitution, I consider it laughable to equate its provisions with the right to grow and consume pot.
People who believe such inhabit a parallel universe where any restrictions on whatever desires may pop into their heads constitutes a violation of their rights. If one wishes to be classed with the Mike Stivics (remember All in the Family) of the world, so be it.
The use of pot and other drugs has brought untold misery
to millions of Americans. And for what? For nothing, except a childish desire to temporarily escape from reality.
When civil rights demonstrators demanded an end to de jure segregation, they acted to eliminate injustice. And they were willing to suffer the penalties prescribed by unjust laws. They did not grow and smoke pot in secret but protested in streets and fought in the courts and legislatures. What sort of nobility of purpose elevates the motives and actions of pot advocates?
The promotion and use of pot and other illicit drugs encourages violence and lawlessness. It is a criminal enterprise - one cannot say that about those who sought full civil rights - and one of the worst scourges to effect this country in its history.
No man is an island entire of himself. No society can
allow people to engage in activity that is dangerous to themselves or others. Those who represent the public must act in the public interest, and the use of pot and other drugs is by no means in the public interest, regardless of the drivel of pot advocates./p>

The promotion and use of pot and other illicit drugs encourages violence and lawlessness.

You sure got that one backwards... The prohibitions against the use of pot and other illicit drugs encourages violence and lawlessness. There are profits to be made, and protected. Show me some pot-crazed guys (LOL). I'll show you a room full of drunks, more likely to create mayhem and violence.

Do you drink alcohol? Do you feel the same way about it, as the other drugs you mentioned?

Your cherishing of the Constitution is touching, but seems to be limited to what YOU think it means to you; like a lot of libs, you want the Constitution to protect YOUR interests, but are unwilling to view it as the Founders intended. It is NOT a document to list the select, most important rights you are LIMITED TO, but rather, it limits the governent from taking certain rights that had, at the time it was written, been used to subjugate citizens in previous years. The reason they did NOT include a "Right to put whatever you want into your own body" is because it was unthinkable at the time that a government would care to. The right to chew gum is a trivial one, but to gum chewers, an important one. Just because I don't chew gum, I shouldn't care if Big Brother outlaws it?

"The use of pot and other drugs has brought untold misery
to millions of Americans" - this should read "The criminalization of pot and other drugs....". Objective thinkers (read: libertarians) know that the societal effects of prohibition are far more grievous than the consumption of the prohibited.

Our rights are ONLY limited by their deprivation of OTHERS' rights, regardless of what laws are in place (laws CAN be unjust, as we all know). They are not limited to those the Constitution explicitly protects, or even to what the majority of the country might be "propagandized" into approving. Rights may be trivial or not, but the SUSPENSION of rights is NEVER so.

As one who cherishes the Constitution, I consider it laughable to equate its provisions with the right to grow and consume pot. People who believe such inhabit a parallel universe where any restrictions on whatever desires may pop into their heads constitutes a violation of their rights.

You may cherish the Constitution, but you'll forgive me if I suggest that you may not fully understand it. The purpose of the Constitution was never to be a full outline of each and every right of the citizens, but rather to be a limit on the power of the FEDERAL government to regulate the lives of its citizens, or to interfere with the sovereignty of the States. A good number of the Founders objected to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights for this very reason, that specifically enumerating any rights is unnecessary since all rights are reserved to the people which are not granted specifically to the federal government (see the 10th amendment).

So, what this means is that there does not need to be an explicit right to grow and consume pot in the Constitution, because the federal government is explicitly forbidden from getting involved in private affairs, or in the matters reserved to sovereign states. The states may outlaw it if they wish - the Constitution does not forbid that, but the federal government is denied that authority.

And that brings up another point which should have any real Conservative unhappy about the federal drug war: the federal WoD is yet another usurpation of State sovereignty. The Founders set out specifically to avoid a powerful central government, and so placed specific limitation on it in favor of allowing the more local governments, which were assumed to be closer to the actual will of the people, to engage in the actual details of governance. Instead, we now have a federal government that micromanages local affairs. We have the Founders' worst nightmare: members of Congress who mostly originate from places thousands of miles away from any one locale passing laws which dictate how that locale can conduct its affairs.