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Why Do You Want Weed to Be Legal?

I have my reasons for wanting weed to be legal, but like many recreational smokers, I have definitely simplified them in my mind based on a personal preference. Yes, it would be awesome not to be hassled for smoking, but is that it? There’s got to be...

The cover of Peter Tosh's Legalize It. Image via.

Over the past year, I met many weed people. Most of them supported the legalization of marijuana for the reasons you’d expect. I’m much more fascinated by the trusted voices that opposed the legalization movement. They inspired this week’s article.

Mantras have the disadvantage of losing some of their original meaning through repetition. Take any word or phrase, say it enough times, and you’ll forget what it really means. As long as weed has been illegal, countless enthusiasts, activists, and social contrarians have campaigned for its emancipation, passing an all-encompassing, common-sense slogan down through generations—“legalize it.” Peter Tosh might never have guessed that the world would actually begin to “legalize it” less than 40 years after he wrote the classic protest song. Now that legalization is actually happening, we’ll finally see if the mission is as simple as the lyrics make it out to be.

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I have my reasons for wanting weed to be legal, but like many recreational smokers, I have definitely simplified them in my mind based on a personal preference. Yes, it would be awesome not to be hassled for smoking, but is that the only reason to support legalization? There’s got to be more to it. When it comes down to it, why do you want weed to be legal?

The first reason that comes to mind is the pure injustice of our traditional weed ideology. For practical reasons, weed shouldn’t be illegal. It is only illegal because a bunch of early 20th century magnates wanted to get us addicted to oil, plastic, and tabloid newspapers. (Some of those magnates are now characters on Boardwalk Empire.)Today, anti-drug laws are keeping minority youths jammed up in our nation’s ruthless prison system. Legalizing weed is about far more than lifting a drug ban—it gives us hope that public opinion and common sense can potentially undo the terrible systems that come from our political system’s fucked-up marriage between politics and the free market. But even if this one symbolic victory comes to pass, a more serious question looms: How can we trust the same political powers that have unjustly perpetuated misguided laws to justly enforce laws the people support?

We’ve seen how dirty weed can be when it’s traded as an illegal drug, but it’s only starting to get dirty in the open market. When weed becomes legal, the marijuana industry is guaranteed to be a multibillion-dollar market, and businessmen like Jamen Shively are poised to cash in on it. It will be no surprise when their ilk turns the plant into an industrial enterprise. What does that mean for the weed we’ll smoke? When I spoke about it to Q, a grower deeply dedicated to his craft and his plants, he was convinced that the secret to quality is personal attention and care to each and every plant. According to him, large-scale cultivation couldn't possibly retain the same quality as private farming. Perhaps part of his reasoning rested on legal weed posing an imminent threat to his future business. But if he’s right, you’d hope his clientele would stick around for better bud. Of course, Q also had a significantly lower promotional budget than Chronic Inc.

As precarious as the business side of weed might be, we can always focus on the medical benefits—its illegal status kept the study of marijuana seriously restricted until recently, and the early results are consistent with what advocates have been saying all along. In addition to its famous effectiveness in treating cancer and glaucoma symptoms, we’re starting to find that cannabis has a positive effect on diseases that are a nightmare to treat with pharmaceuticals, such as severe epilepsy. I presented all this in a recent debate with my sister-in-law, a physician unconvinced of weed’s medical miracles. She is by no means a square—after all, she’s married to my stoner brother Bhai—but no matter how much anecdotal evidence or how many miraculous YouTube videos I showed her, I couldn’t sell her on weed's medical values. In her view, the hoopla around all aspects of cannabis is driving this unreasonable public expectation that we will only discover positives as we continue researching weed's medical uses. She conceded that the current evidence looked promising, but apparently lots of pharmaceuticals looked promising before they underwent the FDA's scrutiny. Although Sanjay Gupta said weed was cool, pot doesn’t get to cut the line. It will take years of studies before we find out which agents treat which diseases, and with that will come further clarity on any potential negative side effects. I admit that I have a hard time believing that anything bad could come out of my favorite plant, but it’s exactly that affection we have to keep in check when surveying weed's effectiveness as a medicine. I’m sure my debates with my sister-in-law will continue until several years of clinical trials are completed.

We don’t know exactly what a world with legalized pot will bring us, but there is no stopping the legalization movement. Those who are against weed are shit out of luck, and those who strive to push legalization forward are far from done with the heavy lifting. I’ll always maintain that it is definitively a good thing for weed to be legal, but if I don’t ask myself why I’m repeating the mantra, I'll lose sight of the larger picture.

@ImYourKid