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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (120148)	6/14/2005 9:48:58 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793924

just the sheer volume of information and problems that are caused by drugs/alcohol is staggering I am aware of the problems caused by drugs/alcohol. I don't need any further information on that. What I am not aware of is how you are extrapolating from the current scenario to predict incremental marijuana addictions should marijuana be legalized. That is the question on the table, not whether drugs are problematic. We all already know that drugs are problematic. The problems with drugs, including marijuana, come from two sources. One is the drugs, themselves--what they do to people. The other is the criminal activity associated with the illegality. If you take away the illegality, you reduce the latter problem. That's a given. What is at question is whether you increase the former problem in the process. We have data that about sixty percent of high school seniors have tried marijuana and it's been in that neighborhood for a while. So we can estimate that at least sixty percent of those of the target age group who are likely to get addicted are already addicted. We can also estimate that at least the same number of people would use legal marijuana as use illegal marijuana. Legalizing it won't stop usage. What we don't know is how many would start using once it was legalized. However many there are, I'm willing, for the sake of argument, to allow that ten percent of them would become addicted as your experts have told you. I'm deducing that the vast majority of those who would use legal marijuana already use illegal marijuana. It's hard for me to imagine that there are many people who would like to try it who either never had the opportunity or were holding out just because it's illegal. That's got to be a small number. And ten percent of a small number is an even smaller number, surely not enough to warrant eschewing what we would gain from mitigating the crime problem through legalization. That's my rationale. If you one that produces a significant number of new marijuana addicts, I'd like to hear it. Nothing else is relevant to the question at hand.