Renegotiating Marijuana-as-Vice

As I’ve outlined in my theory post, what is perhaps needed to move the polarized debate on marijuana towards a constructive course is a re-examination of the laws governing the use of marijuana. Two questions need to be addressed by bureaucrats. First, is it still useful to use the “marijuana-as-vice” value judgment to underpin contemporary drug policy? And if so, what are the current limitations of the law in tackling the problem of marijuana use? If not, how should the law be changed to move away from the concept of “marijuana as vice”?

In the development of my stance on the issue thus far, I have made a supported argument for the rethinking of “marijuana-as-vice”. From there, I made the consequent claim that if one accepts the argument that there needs to be a shift away from the idea of “marijuana-as-vice”, an attendant shift in the legal status of marijuana would then be the next logical step.

At this juncture, however, I recognise that this may perhaps be asking too much of the law, because it requires not only a radical shift in policy values, but also an equally seismic change in the law. As such, the complete move towards marijuana legalization, while still the fundamental goal of my contention, can perhaps be reconfigured more as an eventual target, rather than as a next step of action. This therefore brings my attention to arguing for an intermediate re-evaluation of the law by taking the current assumption that the “marijuana-as-vice” judgment would continue to underpin any change to the law. This is because the general ineffectiveness of the law in combating excessive marijuana use should at least merit its reconsideration in tackling the marijuana problem.

In the light of this, how can the law be changed? Ideally, there needs to be a standardization of marijuana laws across states, or, at the minimum, a standardization of laws governing personal marijuana possession – by far the greatest single category that accounts for marijuana arrests. Given the continued prevalence of marijuana use by teenage and adult Americans alike, could a harsher enforcement of the law – in terms of penalties – be a potential solution to bringing down marijuana use? If so, would the state and federal governments unite to collectively ensure that the necessary funding and infrastructural support would be supplied for to provide for this endeavour?

I do not profess to be an expert in public policy, and the question of how the law can be tweaked perhaps merits a separate research endeavour altogether. However, and as the above paragraph has tried to convey, there are certainly questions that can nonetheless be asked about the law even if we accept the renegotiated notion that marijuana is indeed a form of vice.