“No flawed reasoning, just cold, hard facts. The tack the libertines take that somehow doing illegal and harmful substances doesn’t HURT anyone or is some Constitutional right is beyond ignorant, it’s anarchic. I will fight like hell against ever seeing these substances legalized.”
I’m going to skip your initial response to me since UnknownPundit did a fine job - I’ve been busy.
However, I’m not clear on what you’re talking about here. Alcohol and tobacco are both perfectly legal, and both widely recognized as more harmful than marijuana. Recent research shows smoking pot does not cause lung cancer - in fact it appears to have a preventative effect. Contrast that with cigarettes. Marijuana has never been shown to have any toxic effect whatever on the human body. If you’re still worried about health effects from smoking, it may be eaten.
Alcohol causes numerous fatalities each year, both on the road and during other activities. It also causes serious health problems since it is quite toxic. Liver failure is most common, but it can also contribute to a host of other health problems such as brain damage, heart disease and so on.
BOTH alcohol and tobacco have considerable halo effects in terms of affecting family members and others in the vicinity.
So, just to be clear, I’d like your assurance that you use neither of these substances (after all you’d be a huge hypocrite if you do), and that you’re equally committed to alcohol and tobacco prohibition. That way you at least have an ethically defensible position - however laughable.
I feel it’s a rather pointless exercise debating libertines on the subject, as pro/anti-WOD threads pop up all the time on FR, and they just tend to serve the purpose of clogging up JimRob’s bandwith, and nobody ever changes their mind.
You view it in terms of personal liberty, I view it in terms of public safety. It does not serve the purpose of the general public to start down the slippery slope of full abolition of laws that are specifically designed to protect the citizenry against harmful and deadly substances.
And for the record, I do not smoke, nor do I drink.