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What things do you have very different personal preferences and policy positions on? Do you have any area that you didn't even realize that until the policy changed and lined up with your stated position?
The biggest one that I have been having a difficult time with lately is marijuana. For my entire life, I thought marijuana should be legal and that it's pretty hard to justify having a substantially different control scheme for marijuana than alcohol (tobacco is quite different and I think the comparison is pretty stupid). I still hold this position due to everything I can figure out objectively. There are a few caveats, such as the potential for marijuana to trigger schizophrenia, but really, I doubt it does more harm to a typical person than drinking. I even smoked a decent bit when I was in my younger, party years, and pretty much just had harmless fun.
Nonetheless, it turns out that I don't actually like legal marijuana much. I didn't really notice it when it was mostly illegal, but weed culture is fucking annoying. I get that some people feel that way about alcohol, and I can certainly think of all-out drunkenness scenes that I don't like, but there are big chunks of drinking culture that I do like - craft beer, good bourbon, wine-tasting, cocktails, tailgating, food-drink pairings, this stuff is all somewhere between lowbrow fun and genuinely interesting culture. Pot though? Just fucking annoying. Stupid aesthetics, lazy slobs, constant whining about how pot is actually good for you, man. I don't personally dislike the smell of pot but smelling it on my state's capitol square on a weekday morning is just utterly degenerate. None of this convinces me that it should be illegal, my annoyance doesn't suffice to want something banned, but damn, it turns out that I find stoners way more annoying than I ever would have thought when they had to just smoke at their houses.
I think weed is a great example, because I feel the exact same way. I don't want people to be criminals for choosing to smoke weed, or for that matter for doing any drugs really. I think that we should cover bad behavior arising from drug use with the laws which outlaw that behavior anyway, e.g. if you murder someone because you are an addict we have existing murder laws for that so no need for drug specific stuff.
But all that said... bloody hell, the stoners in my state (CO) are fucking dicks and they make me seriously reconsider my position. I shouldn't have to smell them smoking weed (which smells absolutely awful) when I go to events, when I go to the park, or even when I drive down the bloody street. It seems to me that we (CO society broadly) gave them an inch, and they took a mile. Well, if that's how it's going to be then maybe we should take the initial inch back from people who have shown themselves to be completely antisocial.
I try to stick to my convictions. I'm not actually out there campaigning to reinstate a ban on weed under state law. But holy crap, the stoners have made it hard to stand by those ideals.
I’ll say this about almost any form of legalization. Basically, it becomes available enough that children will have access to it. It’s going to be common in homes much like alcohol and cigarettes are. Which will lower the mean age of people getting access to it. I’m not familiar with the effects of cannabis on a child, but I think any legalization scheme needs to understand this reality and be willing to put up with those negative effects.
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It's always my position that if we're going to legalise weed, I want stench nuisance laws alongside it.
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