There's so much to pull apart here.
First, it seems there's a conflation of the psychoactive with the delivery mechanism. I think smoking should be made generally illegal, especially in public places, and that vapors have many of the same issues.
Cannabis itself is what was made legal in Canada, and I've seen little to suggest that cannabis has caused more problems now than before.
Do we have any evidence of this?
@serge Well, at the #MarginalRevolution post, there's a link to a Bloomberg article discussing effects of marijuana legalisation in the US. Charles Fain Lehman has done some essays at City Journal that shifted my thinking, e.g., https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-legal-weed-is-losing .
@serge I'm not sure this is the essay I had in mind, but it's one by Mr. Lehman with a more comprehensive pro-prohibition argument: https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/how-i-changed-my-mind-about-marijuana
Read it through. I took notes, but they all point to the same thing- his arguments against decriminalization don't make sense to me. He talks about all the harms of criminalization and then dismisses them as unimportant. He then talks about the ills of cannabis use, of which there certainly are some, but doesn't compare that to alcohol and its ills, or video games and its ills.
He says the left and right seem united on decriminalization and reading this essay is a good reason to see why- the arguments for criminalization could be strong, but aren't. There's no evidence of societal harm at the level which we find acceptable for other bad habits, and yet we were spending billions on enforcement, much of which was simply used as pretext for rights violations.
I hate the smell of any smoke, and think *smoking* should be illegal, but I have yet to see a lot of compelling evidence for criminalizing cannabis that doesn't apply to other things as well.
