I say: legalize EVERYTHING. Let the 10 year olds use whatever they want. That'll 'teach 'em.' If it feels good, it can't be wrong . . . right?

But seriously . . . This is one of those issues which shows quite poignantly that: Democracy cannot function at peak efficiency without a vibrant, and evolving educational system coupled with an empowered and enlightened Dept of Family and Child Services system that insures that individual parents are not slacking in their duties to their offspring(s) and the greater social well-being which those offspring(s) are here to serve.

The solution is not to simply give in to the stupidity of the masses as has been done every other time the legislators tried to jump the gun and preemptively regulate beyond the societies ability to teachegulate: Leave the stupid legal system as it stands, and focus on making people smart enough not to become slaves to such drugs (including alcohol) and the laws will become irrelevant. Oh, sorry, that's a long-term solution = generations to make truly sustainable change take place. That won't work for most of you impatient apes who think that any 'effective' social policy must show success in the span of one human life . . .

As a human biologist, I find myself strangely inline with a lot of right-wing fundamentalist views on 'moral' issues (abortion, legalizing pot, appeasing violence), but I think of it this way. On any one of these issues, imagine you are a parent of a 10 year. Imagine your 10 year old engaging in the behavior/act in question (getting an abortion at school during lunchbreak, buying pot at a school vending machine, being murdered by terrorists and then never vindicated in anyway) and then make your left-wing argument one more time . . . and yes, I count alcohol, and tobacco among the things that ideally SHOULD not be normalized by being legalized. But again, lets be rational: before alcohol can effectively be illegalized it would need to be abnormalized. Until we abnormalize it fully (as much for example as serial killing presently is in modern society) then there is little point in illegalizing it, as the need for a "costly war on drugs" demonstrates clearly.

Exactly.

Scipio, what are you on about?

He is on about that there are evels. Some evels are legitimate for trivial reasons, just as others are illigitamate for other trivial reasons. Being a legitimate evel does not make it any less harmful just as being an illigitamate evel does not make it any more. The ying & yang, the harmonious society is what he says.

Granted, I'm not trying to argue that reimposing the Puritan order exemplified in the Scarlett Letter is necessarily better. Just trying to point out that there are costs and benefits to any social policy. You've got to decide what it is you prefer.

I say: go ahead and legalize whatever you want, but make sure you are taking steps to abnormalize all of it. If you don't really know what that means to "abnormalize it," then why do you expect that it is safe to fiddle around with legalizing it?

Leave the other harmful food & drugs legal for now, but take similarly serious steps to abnormalize them. If your efforts to abnormalize (read "re-civilize") the worldviews of your people with respect to these risky and self-destructive substances are successful, then you won't ever actually have to change the laws anyway.

In short: ideally people should not smoke pot, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes, or use any other harmful drug or food (cocaine, caffeine, betel nut, heroine, World of Warcrack, etc.). Why? Because all of these substances cause damage to the body and/or mind.

When you consume marijuana, you are damaging myriad tissues throughout the body, the brain, the reproductive organs, the lungs, the liver, etc. This is by degrees (and with applicability to varying organ systems) true of all the harmful self-destructive and habit forming substances I list above, with perhas cocaine or heroine being on the far right end of the continuum of harmfulness and caffeine and World of Warcrack being on the other left hand side. World of Warcrack in moderation could actually be beneficial I guess . . . Anyway, back to pot: when you smoke a marijuana cigarette once per day for a month, the analagous harm you are doing would be roughly as follows: at the end of the month, take a nice big biopsy needle and inject a very low a diluted dose of some toxin that will kill cells at a predictable but fairly low rate. Inject some into your testicles, into your brain, into your liver, into each lung, etc.

You would not consider it to be 'normal' for a person to inject themselves in these organs with a tissue-damaging toxin on a regular basis would you? So why would you consider it normal to administer a habit-forming, and psychotropic drug with comparable tissue damaging effects on a comparable regular basis?

For chronic low-doses of alcohol, the debate still continues. I think the consensus today is that the harmful effects of alcohol on neural tissues only occur with very high doses, else with relatively high chronic doses, and there is some pretty good evidence that chronic low dosing with alcohol (i.e., 1 to 2 drinks every day) actually helps with blood cholesterol. Anyway, I can agree that alcohol might also belong in the category of harmful substance that should be abnormalized. But there is not much to debate about marijuana: it is harmful.

Laws are not much good at moving a society toward ideals of people avoiding self-destructive behaviors however.

Abnormalizing the selling, ownership, use, or dependency on such self-harming things starting at home and extending throughout all aspects of society is the only real solution, and even then there will be 'offenders.'