It is pretty hard for the law to tell if drink and drugs are the skidmarks in front of the accident or the reverse, and the law is an ass.

I say if the effects are the problem, then outlaw the effects. Have tests to measure objectively when someone’s judgment is impaired, then prosecute only those instances.

The trouble with marijuana and mental problems is the correlation-causation fallacy. Maybe they’re all self medicating?

Likewise alcohol abuse. There are two kinds of problem drinkers: those who have problems because they drink, and those who drink because they have problems. The only sure way to tell these two apart is to know a problem drinker from childhood.

I’m conscious that I’ve always been biased on the file, but with biases that point in both directions-

I’m of the view that any society gets to prioritize its traditional intoxicant or none on historical, familiarity or cultural grounds, so I’m not necessarily persuaded it has an obligation to treat them all the same on purely rational or egalitarian grounds. The latter seems as alien an argument to me as the former seems to many.

I’ve never been a fan of 70s-80s stoner culture, the tropes and mannerisms of which seem to animate a lot of the movement for recreational cannabis even now.

For me, the former seems a satisfactory reply to calls for equality, the latter admittedly just a personal motive. I don’t think the latter alone is cause for prohibition, but since hardly anyone on any cause is not arguing from personal taste deep down, I feel no guilt.

I’ve also managed to drink recreationally for 25 years without being drunk in any meaningful sense, beyond awareness that reflexes would not be up to operating a vehicle, and that one can drink for other qualities than pure mind alteration, or for a rather modest level of mind alteration. Some chance encounter with one of the classical Greeks put in my head the notion that too much mind alteration for its own sake is bad. I can’t pin that down from memory.

I’m OTOH conscious that prohibition was once a radical reformist scheme anyway, as it was with booze, so there’s that.

So all in all, I’m probably down with legalization, which my country is even now implementing in it’s usual top down way, although I suspect it will mean more users than would have been the case a hundred years ago.

But how much is this in the big societal picture? The 10% increase in schizophrenia baseline is plausible (I did some fairly pessimistic estimates off the studies a year or two back and got a 25% schizophrenia increase for full legalisation). That’s obviously not great, but in context may not be so bad, compared to the total mental health budget and the value of marijuana market. Especially if MJ use displaces some alcohol abuse (anything displacing alcohol abuse is generally a good trade).

In short “Yes…but”….This effect looks bad, but it’s not yet selling me as big enough to panic about. As always, open to more and better data….

The 420 people also don’t like to talk about the number of traffic fatalities dramatically increasing (double or more) after legalization.