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I agree completely, and the experience is *considerable*. I liked pot and used it for what it was good for but it's a terrible waste of time and it makes you lazy. One day it wasn't fun anymore and I just stopped. Wasn't even hard.

My own position on the matter is (1) it isn't bad for an adult in moderation, (2) it isn't good for a kid in any amount, (3) it was made illegal for fraudulent and invalid reasons, (4) if it is made legal again there will absolutely be social costs to be paid, because (5) for some people it becomes difficult to quit and (6) for those people it can be very destructive, and (7) for most people it won't.

So the legalization issue becomes a calculus between cost and benefit as does any legislation. I do think the "war" on drugs has had profoundly disturbing effects with respect to civil liberties and that asset forfeiture and "no-knock" searches are wildly unconstitutional. I also think that anyone who minimizes the real hazards of this psychoactive is not acquainted sufficiently with it.

Contradictory enough? Life is like that.

Cost and benefits. That is where the heavy lifting comes in. Broad brush ideological statements won't do. One thing we can do, that is a rather more clear choice, is get many to most the of drug users out of jail. It is a waste of money and space, and is undermining the support for prisons for the violent, plus the jailers become there own rather virulent public employee pressure group. One can see the erosion in California. It isn't a pretty sight, but then the politics of California in general is these days, something less than a wholly satisfying aesthetic experience.

You make some good points in #21.

I smoked weed moderately to heavily as a teenager and lightly to moderately through most of my adult life and kind of just got tired of it like you.

I've always been able to achieve pretty much anything I set my mind to but looking back on my life, I think the weed use made me achieve less than I normally would've by this age and it definitely made me apathetic in a lot of areas which caused me to make some very wrong decisions in regards to certain opportunities that I squandered. (It also makes me write run-on sentences. :o)

It's that old 20/20 hindsight kicking in now that I'm in my 40's and won't have some of those opportunities back.

Excellent summation, and I also dropped my occasional use years ago. One more point to make:

The market for drugs by casual users who don't "Buy American" fuels the cartels who run Northern Mexico and acerbate our porous border problem...endangering the lives of our law enforcement personnel and the hapless illegals coerced into "muling".

Just like how the illegals would self-deport if their use was too costly to employers, the hyper-violent cartels (and the gangers on this side who work with them) would be rendered impotent if their market dried up.