Also, completely tangential. But poverty is the thing that really kills people (including driving them to seeking the thrills of hard drugs). I can almost guarantee that there is a correlation between income level/standard of living and meth zones.
Does that mean you should do stupid things and ruin your life? Probably not. But this is not about doing stupid things. It's about having the option and the option not being constrained by arbitrary things (ie who gets to decide that A is good and B is bad, A is okay, B is life destroying)
also, one thing to consider: It's mostly non-controversial that pot is harmless nowadays. The more you go back in time, the more pot was painted as wrecking your life, a gateway drug, etc. So a lot of what the effect of a drug are can (and is) hearsay + fear-mongering.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4337025/
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827335/
Definitely seems to suggest there are potentially harmful side effects.
ever take tylenol? the pain killer that is available OTC virtually everywhere? do you know what happens if you take double the max recommended dosage? liver failure. for something that's OTC.
for all intents and purposes weed is harmless. In WA, most people that I know have tried weed and some of them are actually doing it on a regular basis. I have yet to hear of any [mental] health issues.
If you do something all day everyday you are dealing with something else and the drug is a way of escapism.
Do you think a few hundred people in the central government should decide how to handle those situations, or the people most intimately familiar with the details?
The problem is that, like the old "we had to destroy the village to save it" cliche from Vietnam, the War on Drugs destroys the very lives it purports to protect.
The illegality of drugs means that the drugs people buy are either not what they're sold as or are of an unknown purity, which leads to overdoses. Such unintentional overdoses from mistakes in gauging substance or purity would virtually disappear if drugs were legal.
The organized crime that runs the drug trade kills many people and has a corrosive effect on our justice system and government and that of many other nations. That too will be greatly reduced with legalization.
Arrests of users, killing of them and their families by police during raids, imprisonment, separating families and ruining lives by all of the above and on top of that criminal records for possession are yet another horrific consequence of the War on Drugs.
Rights are thrown away, police power and surveillance of the population is ratcheted up to ever greater levels in the name of fighting the WOD. Billions of dollars are wasted and billions more given to organized crime instead of paid as taxes to governments.
And on top of it all the WOD is not even effective. People continue to use drugs anyway, if they want to.
So what is the point?
we want a caring society but not at the cost of restricting personal freedoms
And smoking weed doesnt? They are both plants.
The content of cannabis smoke is quite different from tobacco smoke, and in particular it contains a lot of terpenes, and the cannabinoids themselves, which are potent antioxidants.
Last I checked, cannabis smoke was implicated in COPD, but doesn't appear to contribute to lung cancer. That was at least a decade ago, however.