Clearly your experience with marijuana has been limited to after-school PSA's made in the eighties. Alcohol has a worse effect on the human body than marijuana—marijuana, whose negative effects are nowhere near as bad as the effects of tobacco use. Marijuana was made illegal because rich white men wished to hold down a section of the population who happens to enjoy certain features of recreational drugs.
I find your moral argument quite interesting. What about Rastafarians? The constitution protects all religions; even those that chose to use marijuana as a way of worshiping. Granted, there have been cases of devil worshipers being forbid the right to slaughter dogs, but only on the grounds of health codes and building regulations.
Stealing and killing someone's pet hurts the person to whom the pet belongs...smoking marijuana just makes people more tolerable.
Morals are all relative, hence why we need law. If we all had the same uptight morals that smoking marijuana was wrong, then maybe we could outlaw the plant on moral grounds. Marijuana, like all recreational drugs, is something a person does to himself or herself. The internal morality of the individual cannot be limited by an invisible moral majority of uninformed anti-marijuana legislators.
I agree that all marijuana regulation laws in the states should be uniform—in that they should not inhibit my personal freedom (to get high and ride the tiger). The reason prohibition didn’t work was because it was the only amendment that limited the rights of a citizen as opposed to the rest that restrict the power of the government.
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A few comments:
ReplyDeleteFirst, when commenting on another post, try to include quotations, excerpts or links from the original so your readers can follow the argument you're making.
Second, when comparing legal restrictions on marijuana to other drugs, like alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals, perhaps the question to ask is how these legal restrictions are justified in the first place. In suggesting that a drug should be illegal because it is unhealthy, thus constituting a public harm, one appeals to a natural law standard. In suggesting that a drug should be legal because people possess personal freedom to decide what's good for them, one uses another natural law claim regarding the basic autonomy of individuals. Both claims make appeals to morals. One just says it’s immoral to allow people to "hurt" themselves; the other claims that it is immoral to limit their freedom in this regard.
Third, what are the existing legal justifications for drug policy? My guess is that the laws limiting marijuana consumption do not mention "rich white men" having the authority to "hold down a section of the population," though this might be how a legal realist views things. Would there be any other legal justification supporting that view? If we look at existing statute, my guess is that public harm is part of the argument. But would public harm warrant outright prohibition or simply encourage legislative restrictions similar to those used to control alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs?
Fourth, answering that last question brings up the question of procedural justice, which is a special concern of modern natural law theorists. From that standpoint, it is unjust if laws establish a certain procedure for dealing with one category of objects and another procedure for particular objects within that category. So, for instance, the Miranda case referenced by the modern natural law group’s presentation revealed that when there was no common standard for making individuals aware of their rights this constituted an injustice to those who might have received less or less clear information about their legal rights. In the case of "drugs" (and I'm not sure if that is a legal category), the modern natural law theorist might claim that the same standards used to judge the permissibility of other "drugs" should be used in all cases. In other words, there should be no category of drugs that is by definition illegal.
continued . . .
Continuing my previous comment:
ReplyDeleteFifth, but why are some drugs seemingly automatically illegal, e.g. heroine, cocaine, marijuana, etc.? I think the legal standard employed will have to do with the criteria for intoxication: that the very nature of certain drugs is to intoxicate, whereas intoxication is something that occurs only after prolonged exposure to, say, alcohol or prescription sleeping medications. Becoming intoxicated seems to be the dividing line between legality and illegality in many cases. What sorts of legal arguments could justify the claim that intoxication should be considered illegal? Again, this sort of argument seems to rely on a fundamentally moral claim that it is either wrong from a Western Protestant point of view to become intoxicated, or that it is right and good from a Rastafarian-mystical view.
Sixth, other routes to illegality might be more appropriate for positivists. For instance, many things become illegal if they are obtained in the wrong way. For instance, you can’t buy cigarettes in North Carolina, where there are fewer taxes, and drive them up to New York to sell them at a profit because taxes are higher in the Empire State. There’s nothing immoral about this restriction, it’s just that the relevant authorities have determined that you cannot do it. Similarly, we can set aside the moral question of drug use, and ask whether there are any legal routes for distributing certain drugs. Since there are no legal routes for distributing marijuana in Pennsylvania, while a prescription and an authorized dispensary will do the trick in California, the illegality has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with existing legal mechanisms for distribution.
Seventh and finally, try to restrict arguments to topics that are relevant to class. Whether someone has the latest information on the effects of marijuana is only incidentally related to questions of law. Whether or not someone’s moral views are uptight is hardly a legal concern. There are plenty of interesting legal questions to be raised by this debate; we don’t need to go fishing for disputes that obscure the legal importance of an issue.