What Legalising Marijuana is Not

In this post, I devote my attention to refuting two counterarguments against the legalization of marijuana. These points were brought up in the context of comment responses to my previous posts, and I thank the contributors for raising these questions and for allowing me to address them here.

Legalising marijuana is not tantamount to the promotion of its use; it merely gives people the choice to use it legally. Even as it is tempting to think that legalisation would open the floodgates to marijuana promotion, there is still a substantial logic jump one has to make before a causal relationship between legal condonation and legal promotion can be satisfactorily established.

Legalising marijuana is also not necessarily at odds with the responsibilities of the education service in transmitting “good” values to the young. While the fact that children are educated on the desirability of a “drug-free” lifestyle seems at odds with any attempt by the law to legalize the use of marijuana, what must be qualified is that the education process does not force children to make the decision for themselves. Education can inform, qualify, and even persuade, but ultimately it does not determine the type of lifestyle the child will turn out to lead because the child still holds the sacred right in deciding his/her own development.

What must also be differentiated here is the function of education vis-a-vis the function of law. The function of the former is to inform, whilst the function of the latter is to persecute. Ideally, these functions should deal with the same loci of concerns. As a case in point, the act of killing is taught to be immoral and is heavily punished by law. In the case of marijuana, however, and as with the cases of obesity, sexual promiscuity, alcohol consumption, and smoking, the moral boundaries are less clear. In these cases, the function of education should be to equip the individual to make his/her own choices, and the function of law should be to support this function. Insofar as the issue in question is not clearly defined in moral black and whites, the law should not supersede the function of education; neither should education take the function of the law.