Marijuana Debate.
Click to viewA politician supporting marijuana legalization while an actor argues for "faith-based conservatism"? There's a new one.
And in his first few sentences, Baldwin makes it clear that his arguments will all be based in faith:
"Marijuana leads to doing worse things. I don't care what anybody says, what the debate is."
It's funny, the script of the conservative ("Marijuana is a 'gateway drug' that leads to hard drugs") hasn't changed in decades, despite the long-since articulated refutations.
Let me explain to you, Stephen Baldwin, why the debate matters, since so many lives are being ruined by the ideas you're defending:
1) The federal government's own National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that the number of those who have ever tried marijuana and then ended up using heroin once a month, for instance, is around 1 in 1000... as in 0.1%.
2) There has been no positive relationship between the fluctuations of nationwide marijuana use and the fluctuations in the nationwide use of hard drugs. The rates of use bear negative relationships as much as positive ones, and display no correlation whatsoever.
3) Even if they did (and they obviously don't), the argument completely ignores a fundamental question that ought to be answered first: Did marijuana make people more likely to use other drugs, or are most marijuana users just more willing to experiment with drugs in general? Will we make alcohol illegal because it was the first drug used by a vast percentage of marijuana smokers and heroin junkies?
4) Even if marijuana made people more interested in hard drugs (and it obviously doesn't), there still remains the question of whether it is constitutionally ethical to criminalize something that harms no one because we are worried that it might eventually lead to behavior that also harms no one but the user, except in cases of individual irresponsibility. Will we make alcohol illegal because its users are more likely to regularly abuse family members and kill people in car crashes - crimes far worse than giving a blow job or stealing a car radio for cash?
5) With about half of Americans (equaling around 150 million people) claiming to have smoked marijuana (and that's just those who admit it), we should have long ago experienced societal collapse due to an utter deluge of crack fiends and heroin junkies.
You'd think they'd be able to think of something new after this long. The new "Above the Influence" commercials have almost abandoned direct messaging entirely, going for a sort of anti-drug branding... a bandwagon aesthetic more than an argument.
People suck. Sometimes I really hate them.