Over the past few postings, I have frequently brought up the rule of law and its relationship to the marijuana question. In the last post, I further argued that it is neither attractive nor realistic to expect the law to function as the sole moral arbiter of what constitutes “good” and “evil” in society. I rounded up my argument by making the assertion that to do otherwise would be to surrender our distinctive ability to make choices – even ones on marijuana that are relatively morally-trivial in comparison to the less morally-ambivalent acts of murder and rape. Worse, it would serve as a tacit and faithless acceptance of an innate inability to make rational choices on our own.
As the exploration of this topic through this blog draws to a close, I guess whether or not marijuana ought to be legalized depends largely on the kinds of values we would like to adopt towards morality, liberty, and law. Is the use of marijuana moral? Insofar as marijuana use does not cause any form of harm or injury to anyone else other than the user, my sense is that the use of marijuana is amoral. Should people be allowed to decide if they want to use marijuana? To the extent that people are equipped with the knowledge for them to make an informed choice on marijuana use, and given further that any decision to use marijuana does not come at the expense of harm caused to any other individual, I believe that people should be allowed the freedom to exercise this choice. Should the law arbitrarily criminalize all forms of marijuana use? Yes, but if and only if the law can justify convincingly that the use of marijuana causes such great damage to its user and the surrounding community that the only possible, logical, recourse would be to outlaw marijuana altogether.
Legalization or not, what is nonetheless clear is that underpinning any support for either side is a set of values which help guide us towards a resolution of the marijuana question. A successful negotiation of the question of marijuana legalization would therefore need to pinpoint these value assumptions; more importantly, the product of the law should be the aggregated representation of the values held by the general society, and not a select representation of the views of the bureaucratic elite.
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You mention the question of whether marijuana is moral. I thought about this...and came up with, "Doesn't morality differ from person to person?" What one person thinks is moral may be completely immoral to another.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that people should have the right to exercise their choice and suffer the consequences if they choose unwisely. After all, the United States stresses freedom right?
Education of illegal substances and the like are essential to wise decisions. However, even though children are educated about these types of things, they still have the desire to try it.
Thank you for your comments NatureNurture. I think you're right to say that our standards of morality do differ from person to person. But because society cannot function with vastly differing moral standards, the law exists to set a common benchmark of morality in society. What is crucial in this conceptualization, therefore, is that the law must commonly represent the values of the majority. In the case of marijuana, that was not the case when marijuana was criminalized in the 1920s, and a good argument can be made that it is still not the case in the present.
ReplyDeleteThis explains my stance that giving people the right to choose would be a satisfactory solution to the marijuana question. But that is not to say that education, as you've rightly pointed out, should not be factored into this equation. Education is necessary to allow people to make an informed choice, but the power to exercise this choice should nonetheless rest with the people.
The truth is that people are going to use marijuana whether it is legal or not. In fact I think that if it were legalized then the use would go down just because it is not something that one is tempted to do because they know that it is wrong. I do not however agree with the fact that marijuana only affects the person using it. Sure the person smoking are ruining their own lungs and nobody else’s, but drugs and their use have an effect on the lives of the peoples that's using it. One cannot be a productive person in society if they don't use marijuana in moderation.
ReplyDeleteAW, you are absolutely right in saying that marijuana use may affect not just its user, but also the people around him/her. But would this not be the case also with other issues which are privy to exploitation, such as gaming addiction, glue-sniffing, or obesity? While acknowledging that some risk does exist, is this sufficient to warrant a total rejection of marijuana use by the law?
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