yeah, then we will have millions of more addicts due to it’s easy and legal status...pretty dumb.
Unfortunately for your argument, pot is not physically addictive. Alcohol and tobacco are. Try again.
What makes you think that there are millions of people out there just waiting for marijuana to be legalized so they can finally smoke it? Most years the U.S. has the highest per capita number of pot smokers in the world, and when we aren't at the very top we're right up there close to it. There is no country where a substantially higher percentage of the people smoke marijuana than what we see in the U.S.
Our laws don't stop a lot of people from smoking pot. It's already easily available. It's everywhere. The laws don't deter people because it's so easy to get away with smoking marijuana without ever getting caught, and if people do get caught not much will happen to them, especially if they live in one of the several states that have decriminalized where it's basically just like a traffic ticket and people don't end up with a criminal record. Even in parts of the country where the laws are harsher and the consequences of getting caught much more severe, people still aren't deterred because, again, it's so easy to do it without ever getting caught. Most pot smokers never get caught. They keep it at home for the most part and the police never even know they exist. The idiots that do get caught are often caught over and over again, but the majority could smoke pot thousands of times throughout the course of their lives and never get caught, and they know this. Young people who want to try pot are never going to be deterred much by the laws.
The laws don't work. If they did, we'd see substantial differences in the percentage of people that smoke pot in states that have decriminalized and those that haven't. Instead what we see is that per capita use is high even in some states with the harshest laws and in some states where they've decriminalized it is low. We see the same thing internationally. Look at Holland. For more than 30 years now they've allowed people to possess marijuana. They even sell from shops there out in the open. Some of these places are chains. In some cases they'll have like a neon marijuana leaf or something on the store front. They aren't hidden at all. Some will have their product displayed like donuts and bear claws and whatnot like you might find at a bakery. Others hand you a menu with several different varieties of marijuana, hash and marijuana food products on it. These store have permits to do what they are doing, pay taxes and all that. This has been going on for decades there. And guess what, the most recent study I saw showed that slightly less than 20% of the Dutch have tried marijuana compared to over 40% of Americans. With all that easy access, why aren’t all the Dutch running around with five joints hanging out of their mouths?
The reason more people don't smoke marijuana here or in Holland or anywhere else is because there are all sorts of good reasons not to smoke it not related to its legal status. Despite what some people might think, it's not that great. Most people who do try it don't like it that much, or we'd have a heck of a lot more pot smokers. According to our latest government survey, over a 100 million Americans have tried marijuana. If it was legal would we see a huge jump in use? I doubt it very seriously. We already have among the highest use rates in the world. there is no other place where a substantially greater percentage of the population smokes it. It doesn't matter if the laws are on the harsh side or whether they basically just allow it like the do in the Netherlands and several other countries. There are just so many people that will want to smoke marijuana despite all the negatives that come along with it. We might see a spike for a while until the novelty wears off, but after that we might very well see use dropping just like we've seen with tobacco. Marijuana is entirely unregulated and with some fluctuations in the use numbers use has remained high in this country. Tobacco use has been dropping now for decades. We could probably do the same thing with pot, and it will help a lot that all the activists who say its good medicine for anything that ails you and that its the super plant that could save the world and all that nonsense will larger just drift off farther and farther into obscurity when it's legalized. When it's legal it will just be another unhealthy vice and our young people will be much more likely to believe us when we tell them about all the harms it can cause rather than just accusing us of feeding them Reefer Madness propaganda like so many of them do today.