Too bad there is no evidence whatsoever that supports pot being illegal. None. No medical evidence, nothing. It has all been fear mongering and scare tactics since the very beginning. More people are starting to see through the charade.

I agree 100%. But Google and Wikipedia can fix this problem. That’s why support is rising.

I didn’t say that MJ is as carcinogenic as cigarettes, I only stipulated that people will generally believe that they are. It is, after all, still smoke in the lungs. And all that’s necessary for laws to be passed is for people to believe things.

I mean, how many people believe that MJ is physically addictive (on the order of crack or heroine)?

sez the Supreme Court?

I reiterate, if a law is passed by the representative body responsible for making said laws (i.e., Congress), and the body responsible for determining whether or not said law is Constitutional do not nullify the law, the Executive branch has no business emasculating the law. This is abrogation of the Constitutional duty of the Executive branch.

Maybe not. There are some unique challenges to mj cultivation, which tend to encourage indoor growing regardless of legality. Outdoor stuff is generally inferior as a rule.

It’s been studied extensively. There is no correlation. A quick Google will confirm this.

Tobacco is just unusually carcinogenic.

Since regular cigarettes lead to lung cancer, do you think that people won’t believe that marijuana cigarettes will lead to lung cancer? (Even if it’s pestisides and other stuff on the tabacco which is the problem, legal MJ would be grown in a similar way.)

There are people who oppose marijuana for moral reasons, but pretty shortly, don’t you think that there will be people who oppose marijuana for economic reasons?

Actually, yeah, I expect the alcohol and tobacco industries to lobby pretty heavily against it when the push becomes clear. Cotton, too, just like last time. And, just like last time, they will couch it as a moral argument.

There’s actually no evidence of that. Moderate consumption of acohol and mj have no ill effects.

don’t you think that there will be people who oppose marijuana for economic reasons?

Nope. It will be a tax cash cow. Even at 100% tax rates, it will still be much cheaper than now.

You should remember that 43 isn’t actually very old. Your memory spans, what? 35 years? These days a generation is often about 25-30 years. It takes a while to see the effects of ideas play out as one generation explains them to the next, in the great game of telephone that we call culture. It took a few hundred years for the protestant reformation to lead to wide-spread atheism. First Luther lead to Calvin, which lead to really wide-spread splintering (I’m playing a little loose with the dates, obviously), which eventually lead to a plethora of completely unbelievable religions. Though, in fairness, most people can’t remain Calvanists for long. (Atheism is preferable to devil worship.)

Similarly, atheists tend to retain Christian morality for a while. Often their children do, too. But their grandchildren rarely do; Christian morality is not, after all, intellectually consistent with atheism.

“The fact is that I don’t think American society is falling apart, or if it is then so-called conservatives have as much to do with it as anyone else.”

It is, and they do. G.K. Chesterton once observed, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” (That statement was about England about 100 years ago, but it still roughly applies.)

“I watched them tell us that with easy divorce, soon no one would bother getting married, how marriage was “under assault,” only to notice a generation later that young kids took marriage more seriously than their parents instead.”

That’s a very, very low bar, Dean. (depending on who and where you’re talking about, of course.) And things haven’t played out yet. Leaving out those who follow religious dogmas (which haven’t changed), the people who take marriage more seriously than their parents still have a different attitude towards it than their grandparents did.

But you can’t really get around the fact that Christ did say that divorce was bad, and shouldn’t be. That being said, most of the world aside from Christians believes in divorce, so one would expect a christian world with easy divorce to probably look something like the non-christian world with easy divorce. (Except that we have come to the point where long-term co-habitation w/o marriage is quite socially acceptable, which is note entirely like the rest of the world with easy divorce, though it is like some of it.)

But to bring this back to the topic of the post, if you want people to have marijuana, aren’t you worried about socialized medicine? Marijuana is not worse than alcohol or cigarettes, but it’s still bad for your health in the long-term. Whatever may happen in terms of criminalization might well be taken back by national health care. (Again, eventually; but they’ve already come for the trans fats, and we don’t even have socialized medicine yet.)

There are people who oppose marijuana for moral reasons, but pretty shortly, don’t you think that there will be people who oppose marijuana for economic reasons? “Why should I pay for his X” is a pretty big motivator to meddle in other people’s lifestyle choices. It doesn’t have to be a huge number of people, all it needs to be is disjoint with those who disapprove for moral reasons and together with it, a majority.