Absolutely. In the 80s, people were booted from the Marines after their second marijuana offense. (And their first ruined their career.) The thing that most kept me clean was the $17k of college benefits I had from 4 years in the Marines, but I had to be eligible for reenlistment to get them (aka, no drug convictions). I don’t think a major accounting firm like one I worked in would hire someone with a recent marijuana conviction. I presume it’s the same across a wide range of industry. People may or may not be in those kinds of jobs, but many if not most imagine they could be one day.
I might get high on occasion if it was legal, but I don’t want to deal with the risks, much less the drug culture. There are good arguments for legalization, but no increase in use is not one of them.
The fact is that there are many states where simple possession of marijuana has been decriminalized and people caught with it do not end up with a criminal record, and even in states where it has not been decriminalized people are likely to be able to keep these convictions off of their records. In states where it has been decriminalized it is more like a traffic ticket. People pay their fine, which ends up being a civil penalty, and in most of these states these people will not have any criminal record from the conviction. In states where it has not technically been decriminalized, people can still in many cases work it out such that they will not have a conviction on their records. In my state, people can get up to a year in jail for simple possession. There are a couple of places in my state where the judges require a little bit of jail time. Most don’t though and will in many cases let people have deals that will keep the conviction off their records, especially if they have an attorney. In the county where I work as a criminal defense attorney, our misdemeanor judge never appoints a public defender in marijuana possession cases because he never puts people in jail for it. If they just plead without an attorney, they’ll end up with a conviction on their record, but they can petition to expunge it after a year. If they have an attorney and don’t have much of a record and didn’t do anything to tick the cops off too much we’ll be able to work out a deal where they pay several hundred dollars in fines but end up with a clean record. Often police will just dump pot out on the side of the road too. In bigger cities in my state if it’s only a couple of joints the prosecutors won’t even file on it.
Not only are people often able to keep these convictions off of their record, but the likelihood of getting caught is minuscule in the first place. It is true that there may be 700,000 or so marijuana arrests in a year, but in most all of these cases people were doing something else stupid besides just smoking marijuana. They’ll be riding around in cars with the stereo up way to loud smoking a joint. Or they won’t pay a traffic ticket or something and will be found with it when they are arrested on a warrant. It’s usually something stupid like that. If they are otherwise law abiding citizens who stay away from people who are trouble, don’t do dumb things to call attention to themselves, odds are they’ll never be arrested. Think about it. How many “pot smokings” result in an arrest? It’s going to be one in several thousand. There are idiots who get caught over and over again, but the overwhelming majority of pot smokers never get caught.
And the thing is that people know that the chance that they’ll get caught is very small compared to most other illegal activities. If you’re a thief, your probably going to wind up getting caught. People are going to be out looking for you. The police are going to know about it most every time you commit a theft and they’ll be under pressure to catch you. There are likely to be witnesses helping the police find you. That’s not going to be the case for most “pot smokings.” Odds are the pot smoker will never come under police radar as long as he minds his own business and doesn’t cause any trouble.
People know that the chance they’ll get caught smoking pot is tiny, and that if they do get caught the punishment will not be that severe and that they are likely to be able to keep a conviction off their records, and that being a misdemeanor conviction it isn’t really likely to hurt them in future anyway even if they can’t keep it off their records. Most people are not looking to be accountants at a major accounting firm. They’re regular Joes who will work regular Joe jobs. On their job applications they’ll be asked about felony convictions, and of course a first offense marijuana possession charge isn’t going to be a felony. It won’t even be a misdemeanor in many states.
The statistical evidence tends to back up the assertion that the laws don’t make much difference in the percentage of marijuana users. Studies on states that have decriminalized versus those that haven’t conclude that people are just about as likely to smoke pot in states where it hasn’t been decriminalized as they are in states where it has been decriminalized. Look at Mississippi for instance. That’s a state that where marijuana is decriminalized. You won’t get a criminal record there if you are caught with a small amount, but Mississippi is a state where the per capita percentage of marijuana users is consistently well below the national average according to government surveys. We can see the same thing looking at international statistics. There are many countries around the world where marijuana use is almost legal and where those caught with marijuana do not get criminal records, yet on a per capita basis people in these countries tend to be less likely to smoke marijuana than people here, often far less likely. When per capita marijuana use statistics are compared from the various nations around the world, the U.S. is usually at the top of the list or right around the top of the list of nations having the highest per capita marijuana use, despite the fact that our marijuana laws are among the harshest in the Western world. The laws don’t really matter that much.
There are no doubt some people out there who do not smoke marijuana simply because it is illegal. I think most have other reasons for not smoking it besides its legal status, but there have to be at least a few who don’t smoke today who would smoke it if it became legal tomorrow. You said you might. At first I think we’d probably see an increase in use from people like you. Then though you’d probably realize that you don’t like it anymore than you used to like it, or like it even less now that you are a grown man with different priorities than you had when you were young, and you probably wouldn’t continue to mess with it. And I bet if you are working at some major accounting firm or something like that your firm probably wouldn’t want its accountants to be pot smokers, and neither would a lot of your firm’s clients. I don’t think that a change in the legal status of marijuana is all of the sudden going to make it socially acceptable. Why is it that a smaller percentage of people in Holland even ever try marijuana than they do here even though in Holland they’ve allowed marijuana use, possession, and even retail sales for many decades? Part of this is because marijuana use is still not particularly socially acceptable there even if legal. That, and marijuana use obviously just does not appeal to most people as much as drinking does. It’s not a very social drug. There’s a post above mine where a guy talks about smoking it and staring at the wall for hours. I bet he wasn’t exactly the life of the party when he did that. I just don’t think it’s ever going to have the social acceptance alcohol enjoys and it’s never going to be something so many will enjoy doing enough to continue throughout the course of their lives. Most who smoke it do so for a while when they are young and then move on and leave it behind. I bet that will continue to happen when they finally do legalize it, just as it happens in Holland.
Use could actually go down after they legalize it. At first I think its a safe bet that use will go up, but there would be nothing stopping it from going down later. Look at what’s happened with cigarettes. Tobacco is legal yet we’ve seen big decreases in the number of people who smoke and the number who try them in the first place. Why couldn’t the same thing happen with marijuana?