When it comes to marijuana, I always go back to the question: Has the legalization of weed in any city made that city better?
You might ask: What do you mean by better?
Well, is that city now a better place to live for anybody? Has it solved any problem? Has it helped anything? Give me something that has been helped. Show me a city where theyve legalized weed and something about that city, something tangible, has improved. Show me. You cant, because it hasnt. It has not made anywhere a better place to live. There is no example, because it always works the opposite way and we all know it.
Having people walk around stoned all the time has made everything worse. It has improved nothing, absolutely nothing. It has created problems and solved none. So its a bad idea. If youre going to do something that is guaranteed to make nothing better, while making a lot of things worse, then you shouldnt do it. Its really that simple.
And this, by the way, is why I changed my mind on it personally.
I was recently debating this on X/Twitter where all the very fruitful debates happen. Somebody pulled one of my favorite moves where they say, This is what youre saying on this topic now, but let me see if youve always said this exact thing. And someone scandalously discovered that back in 2018 I sent out a tweet where I was advocating for legalizing marijuana.
They didnt have to go search through my tweet history; they could have just asked me and I would tell them, Yes, that used to be my position.
I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana. I was. And I was wrong. I changed my mind; youre allowed to do that. Just because you say something now, you dont have to say exactly the same thing forever until you die. Not only are you allowed to process new information and change your opinion, but you also should. You should be open to new information and your opinion should be open to change depending on that new information.
Thats what happened with legalizing marijuana. I was never militant about it. Its not something I personally want to engage in but I was generally persuaded by the arguments people made in favor of it.
What changed my mind? Well, it really wasnt an argument anybody made on the other side. I simply saw in practice what happens. I heard all the arguments from the weed advocates saying, Oh, yeah, we can legalize it, and heres what the results will be. Foolishly, I believed that argument. Then, when we did legalize it, I saw that none of that happened. In fact, everything the prohibitionists said would happen did happen and none of the positive results that the advocates promised panned out. So, of course I changed my position.
Its not even a valid position anymore to be in favor of weed legalization because weve all seen the results in front of our faces. Theres really nothing else to say about it, which is why you then get a bunch of clichd slogans shouted at you by the potheads.
As an example, I was having this debate recently when someone tweeted this and Im using this because it is like a rundown of the most clichd arguments. They tweeted:
Badcall, alcohol and cigarettes are far worse. God created it. [Weed] It hasnt killed anybody. Veterans need it for PTSD, etc. A Democrat made it illegal decades ago. Joe Biden is against it and thinks its a gateway. Drug prohibition is unconstitutional. Bad call. Alcohol and cigarettes are far worse. God created it. It hasnt killed anybody. Veterans need it for ptsd etc. a democrat made it illegal decades ago. Joe
Biden is against it and thinks its a gateway drug. Prohibition is unconstitutional.
Bobby (@Bobby1493401) March 29, 2024
Im using this as an example because this is the classic rundown of pro-weed arguments we hear all the time. Every tweet that anyone puts out in favor of weed legalization, its always like that or some variation.
There are a few problems with these arguments.
First of all, there are many substances that exist in the natural world that youre not supposed to put in your body. So, saying, God created this stuff is dumb. Even back when I found the pro-weed argument, legalization argument persuasive, I was never persuaded by that because its so stupid.
What? God created it, so therefore its automatically a good idea to light it on fire and inhale it? There are a whole lot of things God has created that you should not light on fire and inhale. There are a lot of things God has created that you should not consume in any form.
If youre lost in the woods, for example, and youre starving, and you stumble across some kind of a bush with berries and without any prior knowledge say, Well, God created these berries, so they must be okay to eat. God created them. If you make that assumption enough times, you will definitely die because God has created a lot of poisoned berries. There are a lot of poisonous things in the world that youre not supposed to consume. So the God created it line is true, but that doesnt mean that its okay to consume.
As for alcohol and cigarettes, even if alcohol and cigarettes are worse, that still doesnt mean that weed should be legal. By that logic, all youve done is add to the problem. And saying that it hasnt killed anyone is just false. For one thing, it ignores the deaths caused by people under the influence and ignores all the volumes of research about all the negative health side effects. Even if I agree that alcohol and tobacco products are just as bad or worse, thats not an argument for legalizing yet another bad thing.
Its sort of like, if I was morbidly obese, but I didnt drink alcohol, and then you said, Well, youre already obese. You might as well be a binge drinker too. That logic doesnt make any sense. That only makes sense in a kind of defeatist suicidal way. Thats quite literally a suicidal argument when youre saying, Well, these other bad things are happening. So lets just add another bad thing? Lets give up, basically? That doesnt make sense.
Also, alcohol and tobacco have been a part of American culture since the beginning of this country. Thats one of the reasons why any effort to totally ban them has not been successful because its just an ingrained part of American culture. Tobacco in particular helped build this country from the very beginning. So did alcohol. Now, Im not saying that this is a definitive reason to not ban them, but it is a reason not to ban them. And its a pretty good one, actually. Tradition matters. History matters. Tobacco and alcohol have been a part of our culture. Historically, marijuana has not. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Somebody brought up that Native Americans smoked it and so it is part of American heritage.
I think its true that Indian tribes had marijuana I havent done a lot of research on this but I dont think that they had it prior to contact with the New World. As far as Im aware, marijuana was introduced to the native tribes in the 15th or the 16th centuries. But even if they didnt smoke marijuana, the native tribes did smoke peyote. They had other kinds of drugs with hallucinogenic properties. So it is probably true that even if it wasnt exactly marijuana, its probably true that the drug habits of Native American tribes were closer to the drug habits of Americans today.
Think about that for a second. Native tribes were 5,000 years behind the civilized world. They were stuck in the Stone Age. Many of them didnt have the wheel. They didnt have written language. Many of them not all were nomadic tribes, hunter-gatherers. They were extremely primitive, even by 16th century standards. So the fact that they were also high all the time perhaps should tell us something. We know that a society with people smoke tobacco constantly and drink whiskey from morning to night can also be a highly functional, highly successful society.
We know that because that was our society. That was our society in the 20th century when we accomplished all of the things we accomplished we were winning world wars and landing on the moon. We went from horse and buggy to the moonlanding.
So we know that the greatest civilizations in the history of the Earth have at least had booze, and people were constantly drunk. Our own civilization had tobacco and booze. Now, Im not saying that tobacco and booze made us great, exactly, but it did not prevent our greatness. There is no evidence on a societal scale that having easy access to legal tobacco and booze will precipitate a societal collapse. Theres no evidence of that because weve seen a society that is drowning in nicotine, caffeine, and booze America has run on those things. So weve seen that. We know that.
What about a society full of stoners and druggies? Can that kind of society thrive? Theres no evidence of that. There has never been a society of people who are drugged out of their mind, stoned, that has thrived. There are plenty of societies that have engaged in those sorts of activities and they live in mud huts.
They struggled to invent the wheel. Thats what that kind of society looks like.
And if we want to end up back there, if we want to just decline all the way and take this thing full circle, then thats whats going to happen.
