Everything hurts others. People and their actions don't exist in a vacuum - we are all players on a team called "society"; the actions of people, even if done privately, can end up affecting the performance of the team. Cars, alcohol, and tobacco are all legal, and all of those things end up harming others directly or through second/third order effects.

I'm not necessarily against decriminalizing or even legalizing marijuana, but I don't think the reason for doing so should be because it "doesn't hurt others", but rather because governments should infringe on liberties as little as possible even if it means bad consequences could emerge from abuse of said liberties.

It's true people need purpose in life. They can find purpose in art, in travel, in maintaining a personal garden, in maintaining connection to their community. Not through bullshit jobs. What's the point of humanity if we can't truly automate the toils of physical and knowledge labor to somewhere south of 10 hours per week? What's all of this for, anyway?

Let people have their legal weed and live a little. We don't need to work so hard. We've achieved so much innovation in the past few thousand years, we ought to enjoy it before perishing, or continuing focusing our lives wholly on work.

If you really want to think of it as a system, then the proper way to think of drug usage is as an escape valve for societal issues like loneliness, hopelessness, etc. If so, then it's important to legalize it so that it can be monitored and measured; if it's measured, then society's government can focus on reducing that measurement as low as possible by treating the systemic issues and not the symptom.

Look around yourself, how many people are fat? That is how well people will responsibly use drugs. A large majority lacks the self control to properly use these substances and the law helps them do it.

Your comparison to the obesity epidemic is a non-sequitur. People abuse drugs to fill an emotional hole in their lives. While that does sometimes happen with food, most overweight people in the US are generally happy. The obesity epidemic isn't caused by people abusing sugar to escape unfulfilling lives; it's caused by callous government policy that makes healthy food expensive and junk food cheap. Too many Americans genuinely lack access to healthy options, let alone ones that are economical.

I used to think that but I don’t anymore. Not having your shut together and not being a contributing member of society hurts others, so drugs aren’t harmless. Drug users are people’s kids, parents, etc., who have responsibilities and often can’t meet them because of their drug use and that hurts people. And the ship has probably sailed on letting drug users die in the street if they need help so the cost of welfare and services are also a burden.

The real question to me is whether making drugs illegal actually creates more burdens than it avoids. I suspect the answer is that if the culture condones drug use, you’ve already lost that battle and making it illegal is pointless. Laws should help reinforce norms. If the norms have broken down, enforcement of the law needs to be too coercive to be feasible. For example divorce also imposes tremendous social costs, but we probably can’t fix that by repealing no-fault divorce laws.

People can actually overcome all sorts of mental and physical problems using these substances, and if that's not a net win for society, I don't know what is... especially considering the abominably ineffective mental health system and insanely expensive medical system.

Religious, sacred, and sacramental use of these substances is something many people also value, as is just having fun or connecting to others in loving ways (as with MDMA).

Not everything's about being a worker drone in the system and valuing your life and everything you do by how much you can contribute vs how much you cost.

That policy hasn't historically worked well.

I suppose if we go down the rabbit hole, if a person is so moody they lose their job and they have children dependent on them, that's a problem. I would put that in the same category as drinking on the job though.

[1] - https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...