Why I Reversed My Opinion on Marijuana. Here’s Why

When it comes to marijuana, I always go back to the question: Has the legalization of weed in any city made that city better?

You might ask: What do you mean by better?

Well, is that city now a better place to live — for anybody? Has it solved any problem? Has it helped anything? Give me something that has been helped. Show me a city where they’ve legalized weed and something about that city, something tangible, has improved. Show me. You can’t, because it hasn’t. It has not made anywhere a better place to live. There is no example, because it always works the opposite way and we all know it.

Having people walk around stoned all the time has made everything worse. It has improved nothing, absolutely nothing. It has created problems and solved none. So it’s a bad idea. If you’re going to do something that is guaranteed to make nothing better, while making a lot of things worse, then you shouldn’t do it. It’s really that simple.

And this, by the way, is why I changed my mind on it personally.

I was recently debating this on X/Twitter — where all the very fruitful debates happen. Somebody pulled one of my favorite moves where they say, “This is what you’re saying on this topic now, but let me see if you’ve always said this exact thing.” And someone “scandalously” discovered that back in 2018 I sent out a tweet where I was advocating for legalizing marijuana.

They didn’t have to go search through my tweet history; they could have just asked me and I would tell them, “Yes, that used to be my position.”

I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana. I was. And I was wrong. I changed my mind; you’re allowed to do that. Just because you say something now, you don’t have to say exactly the same thing forever until you die. Not only are you allowed to process new information and change your opinion, but you also should. You should be open to new information and your opinion should be open to change depending on that new information.

That’s what happened with legalizing marijuana. I was never militant about it. It’s not something I personally want to engage in but I was generally persuaded by the arguments people made in favor of it.

What changed my mind? Well, it really wasn’t an argument anybody made on the other side. I simply saw in practice what happens. I heard all the arguments from the weed advocates saying, “Oh, yeah, we can legalize it, and here’s what the results will be.” Foolishly, I believed that argument. Then, when we did legalize it, I saw that none of that happened. In fact, everything the prohibitionists said would happen did happen and none of the positive results that the advocates promised panned out. So, of course I changed my position.

It’s not even a valid position anymore to be in favor of weed legalization because we’ve all seen the results in front of our faces. There’s really nothing else to say about it, which is why you then get a bunch of clichéd slogans shouted at you by the potheads.

As an example, I was having this debate recently when someone tweeted this — and I’m using this because it is like a rundown of the most clichéd arguments. They tweeted:

Badcall, alcohol and cigarettes are far worse. God created it. [Weed] It hasn’t killed anybody. Veterans need it for PTSD, etc. A Democrat made it illegal decades ago. Joe Biden is against it and thinks it’s a gateway. Drug prohibition is unconstitutional.

Bad call. Alcohol and cigarettes are far worse. God created it. It hasn’t killed anybody. Veterans need it for ptsd etc. a democrat made it illegal decades ago. Joe
Biden is against it and thinks it’s a gateway drug. Prohibition is unconstitutional.

— Bobby (@Bobby1493401) March 29, 2024

I’m using this as an example because this is the classic rundown of pro-weed arguments we hear all the time. Every tweet that anyone puts out in favor of weed legalization, it’s always like that or some variation.

There are a few problems with these arguments.

First of all, there are many substances that exist in the natural world that you’re not supposed to put in your body. So, saying, “God created this stuff” is dumb. Even back when I found the pro-weed argument, legalization argument persuasive, I was never persuaded by that because it’s so stupid.

What? God created it, so therefore it’s automatically a good idea to light it on fire and inhale it? There are a whole lot of things God has created that you should not light on fire and inhale. There are a lot of things God has created that you should not consume in any form.

If you’re lost in the woods, for example, and you’re starving, and you stumble across some kind of a bush with berries and without any prior knowledge say, “Well, God created these berries, so they must be okay to eat. God created them.” If you make that assumption enough times, you will definitely die because God has created a lot of poisoned berries. There are a lot of poisonous things in the world that you’re not supposed to consume. So the “God created it” line is true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s okay to consume.

As for alcohol and cigarettes, even if alcohol and cigarettes are worse, that still doesn’t mean that weed should be legal. By that logic, all you’ve done is add to the problem. And saying that it hasn’t killed anyone is just false. For one thing, it ignores the deaths caused by people under the influence and ignores all the volumes of research about all the negative health side effects. Even if I agree that alcohol and tobacco products are just as bad or worse, that’s not an argument for legalizing yet another bad thing.

It’s sort of like, if I was morbidly obese, but I didn’t drink alcohol, and then you said, ”Well, you’re already obese. You might as well be a binge drinker too.” That logic doesn’t make any sense. That only makes sense in a kind of defeatist suicidal way. That’s quite literally a suicidal argument when you’re saying, “Well, these other bad things are happening.” So let’s just add another bad thing? Let’s give up, basically? That doesn’t make sense.

Also, alcohol and tobacco have been a part of American culture since the beginning of this country. That’s one of the reasons why any effort to totally ban them has not been successful — because it’s just an ingrained part of American culture. Tobacco in particular helped build this country from the very beginning. So did alcohol. Now, I’m not saying that this is a definitive reason to not ban them, but it is a reason not to ban them. And it’s a pretty good one, actually. Tradition matters. History matters. Tobacco and alcohol have been a part of our culture. Historically, marijuana has not.

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Somebody brought up that Native Americans smoked it and so it is part of American heritage.

I think it’s true that Indian tribes had marijuana — I haven’t done a lot of research on this — but I don’t think that they had it prior to contact with the New World. As far as I’m aware, marijuana was introduced to the native tribes in the 15th or the 16th centuries. But even if they didn’t smoke marijuana, the native tribes did smoke peyote. They had other kinds of drugs with hallucinogenic properties. So it is probably true that even if it wasn’t exactly marijuana, it’s probably true that the drug habits of Native American tribes were closer to the drug habits of Americans today.

Think about that for a second. Native tribes were 5,000 years behind the civilized world. They were stuck in the Stone Age. Many of them didn’t have the wheel. They didn’t have written language. Many of them — not all — were nomadic tribes, hunter-gatherers. They were extremely primitive, even by 16th century standards. So the fact that they were also high all the time perhaps should tell us something. We know that a society with people smoke tobacco constantly and drink whiskey from morning to night can also be a highly functional, highly successful society.

We know that because that was our society. That was our society in the 20th century when we accomplished all of the things we accomplished — we were winning world wars and landing on the moon. We went from horse and buggy to the moon landing.

So we know that the greatest civilizations in the history of the Earth have at least had booze, and people were constantly drunk. Our own civilization had tobacco and booze. Now, I’m not saying that tobacco and booze made us great, exactly, but it did not prevent our greatness. There is no evidence on a societal scale that having easy access to legal tobacco and booze will precipitate a societal collapse. There’s no evidence of that because we’ve seen a society that is drowning in nicotine, caffeine, and booze — America has run on those things. So we’ve seen that. We know that.

What about a society full of stoners and druggies? Can that kind of society thrive? There’s no evidence of that. There has never been a society of people who are drugged out of their mind, stoned, that has thrived. There are plenty of societies that have engaged in those sorts of activities and they live in mud huts.

They struggled to invent the wheel. That’s what that kind of society looks like.

And if we want to end up back there, if we want to just decline all the way and take this thing full circle, then that’s what’s going to happen.

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