Should federal marijuana laws be loosened?

969 people died in Tennessee in automobile accidents last year, many families will never be the same......alcohol is the only gateway drug to alcoholism - more domestic violence cases and automobile fatalities involve alcohol that any other substance.......marijuana is not, in a medical sense, addictive - it is not heroin, nor meth, nor ecstasy, nor any other of opium’s many packaging forms…..cooking marijuana? Never heard of such……not that I have great experience in the drug seen since 1969-70 in Vietnam, but never read or heard of such…..

I am sorry you lost your brother. It is not a reason to have thousands sent to jail for possession of pot, any more that possessing a fifth of Jim Beam makes you a danger to society - it’s the inappropriate consumption and public presence that causes the issues that government should be involved in. We tried Prohibition and it gave us the Mafia and The Untouchables - we have been in a Drug War since 1966 or so and how much money and how many lives has this futile effort to control peoples behavior cost, and for what? The amount of drugs seized goes up every year, which means that the amount that gets through increases since even DEA says they “interdict” 10-20% of the total…..

We need to get real on how much of other people’s money we will spend annually to keep people from gaining access to drugs, or should we spend a lesser amount on treatment and education? The same goes for prostitution, legalize it, tax it and zone it…….you cannot legislate morality, and we have become an immoral people….My father taught me that I was responsible for my choices and the outcomes….the laws should be limited to preventing me from hurting another person in society, not trying to teach me what is right and wrong – that train left long ago with an adult….as long as there have been opium dens, there have been opium addicted people, heroin is the same - no amount of law enforcement will stop the addicts from getting drugs….my son is a cop, they break up 10-12 meth labs a month, and next month they break up 10-12 different ones, and the next month……as long as there is a market, there will be a supplier…you cannot eliminate those willing to accept great risk for even greater financial gain, take away the astronomical financial rewards (aka repeal prohibition) and the vast majority of people will stop their illegal behavior (still have some moonshine stills – but it’s a fraction of the illegal traffic of the Prohibition period).

Your brother, God rest his soul, made choices that cost him his life. We should not think that we could make what he was doing “more illegal” and stop his choices, we needed to reach him with something that he wanted more than getting high….whatever that was….but we cannot afford to continue to make criminals out of the occasional pot user, any more than we could the occasional two martini after work folks….