Legalizing Marijuana Even As We Recognise Its Harm

“Do we want another substance that is harmful legalized in our society?”

This question was raised by fellow blogger, AW, in a response to my implications post, and I would like to use this entry to address this, particularly because AW’s point is especially pertinent in light of my stance supporting marijuana legalization.

One of the strongest arguments championed by supporters of legalization – and an argument this blog has frequently called upon – is that there is no reason why marijuana should not be legalized give that more “harmful” substances such as cigarettes or alcohol (especially alcohol) have legal status. The strength of this argument, as AW has rightly alluded to, lies not in the persuasiveness of marijuana as “non-harmful”, but in the fact that it is less “harmful”. This however, does not detract from the fact that marijuana is nonetheless a substance that – by conventional standards – causes more harm than good to the body.

If a case for marijuana legalization can, therefore, be made on the basis that is “less harmful”, the key question to ask next is whether an equally persuasive case can be made regardless of a recognition of its “harm”. While this seems at first glance to be a tall order given the near-impossibility of arguing for something harmful to be legalized, it is my contention that an argument for marijuana legalization can in fact be convincingly outlined.

A negotiation of the moral component implicit in AW’s comment involves an interrogation into the function of the law. What is the role of law in society? Is the law meant to protect and buffer society completely from an arbitrarily-defined set of ills and evils? Is it realistic to expect the law to carry out such a function effectively? Should the law be the sole arbiter of what constitutes “good” and “harmful” objects and practices in any given society?

My sense is that it would not be realistic for the law to be the sole arbiter of morality, for the simple reason that apart from universally-unacceptable acts such as the murder of a fellow human being, all other things exist in shades of moral gray. What is unacceptable to some, such as marijuana use, may in fact be acceptable to others. My sense is also that even if we assume the law ought to serve the function of bubble-wrapping society from all forms of moral-ill, this desire is couched more in idealism that reality. After all, the condemnation of the law nonetheless does not prevent the act of murder from being committed. Closer to the context of this debate, the law has certainly not prevented marijuana from continuing to be the most-abused drug in the country.

If the law therefore should not, and cannot, be the only mechanism by which “harm” and “good” is decided by society, what then can supplement and make up for the shortfalls of the law? I am of the opinion that people need to empowered to make choices on their own, and this would involve the trickier and often-misrepresented mechanism of education. It is true that the law should, to some extent, act as an aggregated representative for the general moral values of a society. But we are not talking here about the legalization of acts as contentious as euthanasia, abortion, or suicide which involve questions of life and death. We are talking here of the moral and legal acceptability of marijuana use, a question that is far less morally controversial than what it is often made out to be.

Within the boundaries of this conceptual frame, I would accept that there can be a case made for the immorality of marijuana, because it does cause harm to one’s body. I would even go as far as to concede that the “harm” it causes is significant enough to warrant some form of moral consideration for its use. Yet, one needs to make a distinction between the moral acceptability and legal acceptability; they do not necessarily reinforce the other. Just because it may be immoral to lie or cheat does not mean that all forms of lying and cheating should be outlawed. In the same vein, while society can be taught that the use of marijuana, like alcohol and cigarettes, is undesirable and even immoral, people should nonetheless be given their right to exercise their choice on marijuana use - with some provisos – without fear of being unnecessarily punished by the law. If we surrender our ability to make choices altogether to the law (notwithstanding the fact that the law is, in the final analysis, an arbitrarily set of guidelines defined by the society’s elite), we lose the very thing that makes us unique as human beings – the ability to rationalize our own choices through a complex consideration of moral, legal, and personal perspectives.

Human Agency in the Marijuana Debate

I would like to devote this post to addressing the slippery slope argument commonly raised by opponents of marijuana legalization. My reason for doing so is because most of the objections to marijuana legalization revolve around this sort of logic, which I will contend to be fallacious.

One of the strongest variants of this form of argumentation is that marijuana legalization would open the floodgates to widespread drug abuse, and that the social undesirability of widespread drug abuse should therefore suffice to prevent its legalization. Yet notice how the logic of this argument works - by claiming that marijuana legalization would result in widespread abuse, the assumption is that the former is inversely and directly related to the latter in a simplistic two-model relationship. This sort of reasoning is fallacious because there is no reason to suggest that marijuana legalization would inevitably result in widespread drug abuse; it holds no more weight than the converse argument that marijuana legalization would inevitably not result in widespread drug abuse.

Of course, to dismiss the slippery slope argument is not to deny the possibility that the picture painted by the slippery slope may in fact, come into being. But how much cogency might this view possess? While there is certainly some justification for the argument that a more liberalized law might encourage a more liberalized attitude to marijuana use, to extrapolate this to encompass a slippery slope of moral decadence in society would be to assume that social norms and attitudes are wholly dependent on the rule of law. By the very same logic, relaxed gun laws would inevitably result in cases of more people shooting one another, as would relaxed cigarette laws on more people smoking.

What seems to be overlooked in all these is the factor of human agency. People nonetheless still possess the inherent ability to make choices, and not all choices are – even though it is attractive to think so – necessarily bad ones. To treat the rule of law simply as the sole arbiter of social behaviour like the slippery slope argument does is convenient, but unpersuasive. Worse, underpinning this sort of reasoning is the idea that human beings are wholly dependent on the rule of law to decide what is beneficial and harmful to us. I would instead like to think that most of us have the ability to decide these on our own.