And Milton Friedman. Amazing isn’t it that the two people who intellectually led the modern conservative movement were so easily taken in by liberals? Or maybe they just saw the problems with marijuana prohibition for themselves. Or maybe they just liked to smoke pot or hung around with those who did. Undoubtedly though there view is a minority one among conservatives.
My point was use is less in a place with legalized marijuana than it is where it is illegal.
That's not what the article you posted says at all. It compares a number of statistics none of which compares over all population use of marijuana or hash. From the article:
In identical questionnaires administered in Amsterdam and San Francisco (cities chosen for their similarities as politically liberal northern port cities with universities and populations of roughly 700,000 people), nearly 500 respondents who had used marijuana at least 25 times were asked detailed questions about their marijuana use. The questionnaire explored such issues as age at first use, regular and maximum use, frequency and quantity of use over time, intensity and duration of intoxication, career use patterns, and use of other illicit drugs.
So this study ONLY asked 500 regular users of pot some of their habits. There is nothing in there to support your statement that pot use decreases or stays the same after legalization by the general population. They essentially surveyed stoners to see if it made a difference. And they did it in San Francisco which is the most pot tolerant city in the country.
So the study you cited is just so much liberal propaganda.
Here is an interview with Milton Friedman. I think you will find it interesting, especially this part:
"I'm an economist, but the economics problem is strictly tertiary. It's a moral problem. It's a problem of the harm which the government is doing.
I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year. It's a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people. It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
Of course, we're wasting money on it. Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars a year, but that's trivial. We're wasting that much money in many other ways, such as buying crops that ought never to be produced."
Imagine that, immoral to continue prohibition.
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