“Marijuana can’t kill you” is a popular refrain in the cannabis community, for obvious reasons. Unlike just about every other substance on Earth, you cannot consume enough marijuana to overdose and die.
Of course, like anything else, marijuana use can start a chain of events that lead to your death. For example, if you’re doing a dab on a 3rd floor balcony and you take too large a hit and get light-headed and fall off the balcony, you could die. You could choke to death on a very dry pot brownie. Life is weird and weird things happen all the time.
Then there are the avoidable deaths that can come from marijuana use, like the cases of patients who have been denied organ transplants because of their choice of medical marijuana. An uncountable number of people have been given less of a chance at life because they chose a safer alternative to dangerous and addictive prescription drugs.
The legalization of marijuana would solve some of these problems, others it would not. You still might need some milk for that brownie, regardless of its legality. And the fact that substances that are much more dangerous than marijuana and kill tens of thousands of people every year can be bought on most store shelves is a ridiculous set of circumstances, but even the proven safety of marijuana is not the main reason it should be legal.
Cannabis should be legal because the people who possess, consume, grow and sell it are not infringing on the rights of anyone else. Now, here is where many will begin talking about societal implications of marijuana use and claim someone else will be paying for the decision later, so rights are being infringed, etc.
The problem with that line of logic is that it can be applied to just about anything. Someone deciding to eat 10 Big Macs a month could very well be making a decision other people will end up paying for down the road. The federal government could ban Big Macs, and all other unhealthy foods, but who decides what is unhealthy and how that would be enforced? Are we going to prohibit all foods with a certain fat content or a certain number of calories? And all because some people will abuse the privilege of being able to eat as many Big Macs as they want?
As I’ve said before, if you don’t want to pay for the mistakes of others, take it up with the lawmakers who force you to. The alternative is banning every single thing that could cause harm to anyone.
Is that a world you would want to live in?
