Which States Have Decriminalized Marijuana Possession?

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: There was a huge response to this article, but most of the comments covered well-known ground. The first two views below at least were not repeated by hundreds of other posters. Those on the Fray supporting de-criminalization vastly out-numbered those who opposed it.]


Keep pot illegal in public, but if an individual wants to grow, smoke, swim in, eat, or whatever in his own home let them. Don't let him walk to the bus stop with his son with a joint hanging out of his mouth, but if he wants to smoke while watching his favorite cartoon let him. Let retailers sell seeds but not weed. Make the people who want to smoke pot grow it themselves. If a person is found with weed in their car, pocket, or whatever fine them and give them jail time because they have no excuse to transport. If they want to smoke at a friend's house make that friend grow it.

--Dan

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"...a legal, regulated market for marijuana, like that for alcohol."

In the United States, where money talks and everything else is characterized as BS in comparison, the purveyors in any profitable market will soon own the law and the regulators. We're all familiar with the concept of "no controlling legal authority", which applies even more closely to tobacco and alcohol regulation than campaign finance regulation. Kill a few dozen customers by selling them faulty tires, and you risk prison; kill half a million Americans a year with a product that does nothing practical except kill people, and the folks who seek to restrain you in any way are thought of as some kind of Socialists.

Twenty years after marijuana is legalized, when Americans start dying by the tens of thousands, it will be too late to go back, too late to return to sanity. By then the marijuana industry will have acquired a controlling interest in Congress at the cost of a mere fraction of its profits

--Glenn Tomkins

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How come the government thinks it knows best what's good/bad for us? The more I look, the more I find out how many laws I run afoul of every day. I don't mean drug laws per se: the fact is, the average citizen doesn't actually know the extent of the existing legislation he/she is supposed to be controlled by. It's a trap set to getcha. And with enforcement agencies slowly but surely usurping the right to privacy (especially with regard to electronic communication), greater numbers of otherwise honest citizens are potentially in trouble. How many prisons are we going to build, how much money will be wasted before the agencies figure out honest mistakes and victimless crimes ought to be left alone? And by the way, how come it's illegal for ordinary citizens but not for the ruling elite? I don't see any jail of prison populated with them, even when they get caught. Come on, people! This is supposed to be freedom. You know, the kind of ideal we fought for and died in wars over

--The Wandering Void

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While I can't approve of your pot-smoking, I don't want the Government to spend its time and my money looking for miscreants like you. You are only harmful to yourself and perhaps your children who I may have to teach some day.

--Donjon8

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[Part of a much longer message answering the previous poster in detail.]


Government and independent studies have consistently found that our current marijuana laws are doing nothing to stop people from choosing to light up. What they have found is that the current system actually causes more people to expand into other, actually harmful drugs because they are placed into the same category as marijuana. Why then, do politicians still support the 400 billion dollar war on drugs? It is because they either don't know the truth, or are scared to take a "soft" position on the drug issue. Call me crazy, but if a "hard" line approach hasn't worked in this country since the 1930's, and doesn't work anywhere else in the world, is it really an approach at all?

--Brandon Hall

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