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I don’t have the persuasive skills necessary to enlighten you if you’ve already determined that those who oppose legalization are stupid. Just curious, because I can’t figure out why otherwise sharp people have a hard time with this, do you smoke pot? Have you been around many pot smokers?

I don't believe that people who oppose legalization are stupid, necessarily. I said that the arguments have been irrational. Smart people are quite capable of being irrational when topics with emotional associations are discussed. For example, I think that, for many people of the Boomer generation and older, pot smoking is associated strongly with the counter-culture hippie idiots of the 1960s and 1970s, and so the idea of societal acceptance of what they see as a symbol of that group is intolerable to them, and that repulsion seems to be so great that they will accept gross government violations as long as that symbol remains illegal.

The fact is that I have known people who were regular pot smokers all my life. I have smoked it myself, but never liked the stuff too much when I was a teenager and young adult, so I didn't get too involved with that back then. However, I have had enough experience and exposure to both users and the effect of the drug to know that most of the wild claims of reefer madness made by people on this site and in general are ridiculous. I know a number of professional, responsible, middle-aged people who have been pot users (but not abusers) for most of their lives. Additionally, I blow some minds when I tell people that half the GIs I knew when I was a grunt in the Army were just waiting for their ETS so they could light up. It's not just for hippies anymore.

Worthless people who are stoners would have been worthless without marijuana. They would (and do) find other ways to be worthless if marijuana didn't exist. Meanwhile, the WoD has become a cure (not even that - a treatment) that is worse than the disease. I suspect that one of the reasons that our government pushes the anti-marijuana angle so hard is because they love the convenient excuse it gives them for increasing the breadth and scope of their power. Local police departments would never have gotten armored vehicles, nor, perhaps, militarized SWAT teams, without the WoD.