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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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You're gonna have a hard time defining "drug" in a way that all people agree with.
Presumably you don't mean prescription medications, though of course many of them are abused. Does caffeine count? Coffee is linked to many measurable health benefits. What about alcohol? No health benefit and a clear risk of abuse, but there's also thousands of years of social history, and I think plenty of people would say that, at least sometimes, the benefits of a great night out with friends or meeting new people and developing new relationships is more than worth the cost.
Then you have things like hallucinogens, which generally have only minor health concerns and were mostly criminalized for political reasons. Marijuana is literally a plant, and while the health profile is mixed, at least for some people, it's without a doubt a net positive. In comparison, and especially relevant to Mexico, there's heroin, which is incredibly addictive and dangerous while also funneling tons of money into the cartels.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, but more to make the case that any kind of policy or position on "drugs" as a whole is way too widely scoped. There are too many different substances with drastically different social and medical costs and benefits. Probably no one should ever consume heroin or meth. People with a risk of schizophrenia should absolutely not touch LSD, but people with PTSD may genuinely benefit from MDMA. Alcoholics should never touch alcohol, but your average person having a few drinks on a Friday night out with some friends probably isn't making a bad decision.
As an aside, and having nothing to do with your thoughts or arguments, I'd like to take a moment to communicate that the common talking points of "it's a plant" and "it's natural" regarding marijuana should come with massive asterisks, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that cocaine and heroin come from plants too. And that there are synthetic THC-related products which aren't generally distinguished from the actual plant products in such discussions. There are also highly concentrated THC products, such as oils, which are pretty inarguably incomparable to using the plant as it occurs in nature.
So, we can nitpick about maybe banning concentrates and delta-8 and whatnot and maybe only legalize the plant in it's natural form, right? Well, that brings us to another point: modern marijuana strains have been bred to have a THC content dozens of times higher than what occurs in nature, as well as a dramatically lower relative ratio of CBD (CBD counteracts some of the bad of the THC, by my limited understanding, but that's outside the scope of this discussion), so calling it "natural" now is more than a bit misleading. It IS a plant, but so are poppies (from which we derive opium/heroin), coca (doesn't even need processing to get the cocaine), and belladonna (deadly nightshade, from which we derive digoxin), and, well, nobody here is arguing that those are safe to consume on the basis of their being or deriving from plants.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The only thing that matters is that (in adults) it's very clearly demonstrated by abundant research to be perfectly harmless.
In and of itself, the lack of harm makes it impossible for you to be a redeemable human being if you want to tell a consenting adult that they can't have it.
That's ignoring all the evidence supporting benefits.
Perfectly harmless is overstating the case. It is undoubtedly much less harmful than alcohol, but there are still some detrimental effects.
Of course, there are also significant, much more so, detrimental effects to soda and to sitting down. There's a level of risk for which society has solidly decided that the choice is up to the individual, and marijuana undoubtedly should be in that category, but we shouldn't pretend that there are literally zero negative effects.
It's not. There's no evidence for any harm of any kind from THC or the other psychoactive ingredients in adults.
Smoking, specifically, yes, but there are many, many other ways to ingest it, and smoking is most common in large part because of the backwards ass laws.
It's not like alcohol, where the desired altered state is exchanged for fucking up your liver, kidneys, etc. It doesn't do any of that, even with extremely heavy use.
The relevant ones are the ones cartels make money trafficking or producing: opiates, cocaine and meth.