^^ There is always an argument made for tobacco/nicotine and alcohol. But I feel like these have been around for such a long time, they have either shaped or had no effect on our society today. Opium fucked up China when the British brought it there. That's one notorious example I know of. The rest of the drugs, I have seen others with my own eyes. Weed, pills, acid, shrooms, all that shit. I don't care if they're "minor, gateway" drugs. They are still drugs. There will always be people that stand at the gates that separate "legal" from "illegal." You move that border over a little bit to make marijuana legal, there will be "gate-rattlers" that will call for the legalization of the next most used recreational drugs in heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy.
What do we do then? Draw the line there? Who are you to draw the line until marijuana? Or do you advocate extending it to ecstasy and beyond?
What I'm comparing it to is gay rights and the right to get married. There was such an opposition to it all for so long and now finally the levee has broke and states are legalizing it. Good. The new frontier after gay and lesbian marriage is the rights of transexuals. We never really talked about that before, now did we? Now it's here and soon to be in our face. Laws protecting transexuals. There's going to be another after that, I'm sure. But see, these are human rights. There are trannies getting beat up for being trannies and gays getting beat up for the same thing. Antagonized by society for basic human rights.
The war on drugs is something else. There is no right to expose the public to legalizing it.
If it's the government we're mad at, then that's something else. I'm not political at all. It is the equivalent of watching people debate religion, for me. But if the government, the FDA, didn't regulate shit, we'd have people running around with tardive dyskinesia with no compensation. They took the risk in taking that unregulated drug, they should pay the price for it. Right?