by Jason Stotts
This November in the California election, a momentous event is transpiring: the people are getting the chance to vote on whether they want to legalize marijuana. If Prop 19 passes, it will make it legal for any adult in the state to use marijuana, in the same way that they use alcohol, and with similar restrictions.
While some people are completely against this move, I completely support the full legalization of marijuana.
I see marijuana the same way that I see alcohol: as a drug that certain people enjoy in order to artificially alter their moods. Alcohol is dangerous: people die all of the time from drunk driving, binge drinking, kidney failure, etc. Certainly more people die every year from alcohol use than from marijuana use. Nonetheless, marijuana is also dangerous. Not only is it known to cause cancer (like smoking tobacco), it reduces your reaction time for driving just like alcohol, and is also bad for your memory and mind.
Because both alcohol and marijuana can be used for good reasons, I think they should be legal. However, insofar as alcohol and marijuana divorce one’s mind from reality and prevent one from actually addressing the feelings and situations that lead one to substitute pot or alcohol for real changes, to attempt to escape the reality of their situation, I think that these drugs are generally immoral. This does not mean that all uses of these substances are immoral, but that the line is thin and they are commonly used in ways that harm a person’s life.
Now, someone could certainly argue that not only does small amounts of alcohol not hurt you, there are known health benefits in certain kinds of whiskeys (like scotch) and red wine. This is true, but is also not the case I am talking about. A glass of red wine with dinner is not harmful, drinking all of the time because you can’t handle the reality of your life is. The case of marijuana is only somewhat congruent, however. In small doses marijuana, just like alcohol, can be used to help a person relax and can help reduce stress. However, marijuana is known to cause cancer and more strongly disassociates one’s mind from reality than does alcohol.
The most obvious cases where marijuana use would be moral is where marijuana has medicinal benefits as in the case of a seriously injured or dying person who is using the marijuana to control pain. There are also medically convincing reasons to use marijuana to encourage eating in patients who would otherwise have no appetite, as is sometimes the case during chemo treatment and certain diseases. Further, studies show that marijuana can reduce anxiety and nervousness and could be used beneficially in conjunction with psychological treatment to help certain kinds of psychological disorders.
It is not so much the cases of the person who occasionally uses marijuana that we find morally objectionable, it is the case of the addict that we find immoral: just like we have no moral objection to the occasional use of alcohol, but object to the alcoholic. The objection is born of the addict’s habitual and purposeful removal of his mind from reality and his self-destructive actions. Generally actions are not morally judged in isolation, unless they are of an extreme nature, and a person’s moral status must be judged by his overall character. This is the crux of the objection to the alcoholic or pothead: their character is corrupt and their life is in decline.
Nevertheless, even in cases where marijuana use is immoral, it should still be legal: far more harm than good is done by making a fairly benign drug like marijuana illegal. Indeed, a law outlawing marijuana might as well be a law creating a black market for marijuana, as the latter follows inexorably from the former. Outlawing marijuana also reduces the supply of marijuana and makes it much more dangerous to sell, thus dramatically increasing the price. The more strictly marijuana is regulated and enforced, the higher the price goes and the more incentive people have to enter the market as sellers. Further, smart criminals will realize that they will have cost savings and protection in economies of scale and thus organized crime is born.
On the other hand, if we legalize marijuana, we can control the points of distribution (like is currently done with liquor licenses), we can set an age limit (like the current drinking age), we could reduce the number of non-dangerous persons in prisons and in general as we would reduce the incentives to enter a life of crime, and we could raise tax revenue from the sales tax on marijuana. Incidentally, legalization would effectively destroy the entire black market for marijuana almost instantly as the availability of marijuana would drive down the price and make the disincentives to entry (jail time, etc) not worth the profit of the lower priced marijuana. Not only would this completely destroy the black market for marijuana, it would also harm the black market for many other illegal drugs as one of the most popular drugs would be take out of the black market, leaving drug dealers with only the more expensive and more dangerous drugs. This would decrease the profits in the overall black market for drugs and thus decrease the black market itself, reducing organized crime and likely crime overall.
Thus, there are many reasons to legalize marijuana and we actually have the chance to do this with our votes. We literally have the chance to make our entire state better: to increase state revenues, to reduce crime, to reduce non-dangerous persons in jails, to reduce wasted hours by law enforcement on crimes that have no victims, and most importantly, to return to each individual, the only person who has a moral right to make that decision, the right to guide his own life.