I'm 100% pro-legalisation, not because I believe cannabis is harmless (I got psychologically hooked the exact way lacker describes), but because:

1. Putting people in prison for using it causes more harm than the actual usage of it does.

2. The threat of state force being used to strip people of their freedoms is not an effective deterrent. The war on drugs is an objective failure.

3. The war on drugs was nonsensical to begin with. You are legally free to drink bleach. You can legally drink yourself to death on alcohol. You can legally consume enough caffeine to give yourself a heart attack and die on the spot. You can legally smoke 100 packs of highly addictive and harmful cigarettes a day. But you can't legally consume cannabis, which remains a schedule 1 drug?

Legalisation is of utmost importance not because cannabis is good and we ought to encourage consumption, but because the alternative (criminalisation) is irrational, morally reprehensible, and a costly waste of taxpayer resources.

There is no good that comes from criminalisation, only more harm, more waste, and more people being stripped of basic human rights for no justifiable reason.

There are gradations between putting people in prison and full legalization. Speeding in a school zone is illegal but it generally won’t land me in prison. I don’t favor imprisoning drug users but that doesn’t mean we need a free-for-all with weed stores.

Criminalising the sale just turns what could otherwise be taxed and regulated product (tested for mycotoxins, pesticides, solvents, heavy metals, etc; ++tax revenue) into an unregulated (and thus less safe) and untaxed product sold exclusively in illicit markets.

Again, it's not about wanting to encourage the sale of it, it's that the alternative (criminalisation) causes more harm than good.

To your point, I'm all for having a surgeon general's warning on cannabis products, restricting the sale to age 25+ (when the prefrontal cortex is much closer to finishing development), and other measures that may reduce harm, rather than increasing it.

Users of weed do more to keep it illegal by their off-putting rhetoric than any Refer Madness propaganda does. I've been in favor of legalization for decades but really dislike discussing it with users because of their often lack of self-awareness and tendency to be just as dishonest as those against it.

"Pot smokers are aggravating" is, frankly, a very stupid reason for anybody to support criminalization.

What? Like, films such as Reefer Madness were created at the height of the anti-marijuana propaganda drive fueled by strongly racist rhetoric to stamp out minorities. That drive and rhetoric dictated US policy for over 50 years, resulted in increasing penalties against marijuana users and leads up to the current day where it's still classified as Schedule I drug.

Your framing of the situation is just remarkably wrong considering the entire legal history of marijuana in the US.

Your comment kinda demonstrates his point though. He made a comparison, and you pointed out that what he compared weed consumption to is crazy. And you said absolutely nothing about weed consumption itself which is required to understand the validity of the comparison. And not providing that part is exactly demonstrating the lack of self-awareness.

His comparison was between your average smoker arguing for legality vs an entire institution that was setup to criminalize and demonize them for decades, then calling them equally a problem. What exactly here would change the validity of the comparison?

At least claiming that your average smoker arguing for legality would provide more substantiated arguments, than the institution in question.