As someone who had an alcoholic stepfather growing up, me and my mother would both ultimately have preferred a lotus eater. Alcohol is already legal (and always will be, as prohibition showed us), so there's no point in criminalizing any drug that's less destructive than alcohol is.

So now we’ll have alcoholics and marijuana addicts.

So nothing is changing then

I can't tell if you're intentionally trolling or not, but this response is weak.

18%* of the nation, so not quite the blanket generalization that your judgemental approach would like it to be.

Edit: And that number even includes people who have used it "at least once", so the number of regular/habitual users would be lower than that.

https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/data-statistics.htm

It will 100% go up over time. An important (perhaps the most important) part of law is signaling social norms. We don’t make it illegal to steal because we think we can enforce every little instance of shoplifting. We do it so we can clearly signal that it’s “bad.” Those signals keep the normal people on the moral path. When you remove that signal, you’ll normalize it and usage will go up.

Usage will increase, but it's laughable that people think this will turn us into a nation of locust eaters.

Why is it laughable?

Because it won't. And even if that's what we become, it will hardly be the only, or the defining, reason. One could also blame being glued to social media, or glued to anything tech, for entertainment, which much of HN's userbase has contributed to in some way.

But cannabis itself turning us into a nation of locust eaters? Laughable.