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Notes -
You have described my feelings about marijuana. As with obesity, the real enemy is our culture’s allergy to moderation.
+1 on the marijuana thing. In principle, I want it to be legal to smoke weed because it's not my business what people do to their bodies. But in practice, it turns out that legal weed emboldens a bunch of jerks who think it's ok to smoke absolutely everywhere, so that I can hardly drive around my city (Denver) sometimes without having to smell their foul-smelling weed. I'm to the point that I would rather make it illegal again, which I know sucks for people who act reasonably. But I don't see how else we can make it so that the unreasonable folks don't get to make everything smell like weed.
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Ding ding ding.
If gambling was a "once in a while, for fun" activity, or people smoked weed in their house and NOWHERE else, or people would only eat McDonalds once a week at most, then we absolutely wouldn't need any kind of laws in place, legalize it all.
But our brains didn't evolve that way, we want to gorge on certain things because in the ancestral environment times of true 'abundance' was rare.
My vice is fuckin' sugar. Right now I'm stuffing my face with candy that has 19 grams of it per serving. I work out like crazy to keep it from making me fat, but I'm well aware its just my caveman brain telling me I need to store up fat for the winter or something.
If we could just accept the basic idea that "willpower isn't enough", then perhaps the next discussion is what the appropriate time and place for things are, and how we should intervene to help those who can't control themselves well enough.
If weed was confined to frat parties and the bar district, and hippie retreats that normal people avoided for fear of public nudity drills…
But see, as a society, we have this arrangement set up for alcohol. We have it set up for sexually oriented businesses and casino gambling. But we don’t have it for porn, or weed, or junk food, or sports betting or any other of these modern vices. And there’s incredible resistance to it for these things- where alcohol and strip club laws are mostly uncontroversial.
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