Values and Beliefs in the Marijuana Debate

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.