Of course. But look around you. Our governments won’t do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I’m more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.

So we should just throw up our hands and do nothing rather than fight for justice.

I agree. But it’s not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle.

So? There are systems that can deal with these problems. Addiction clinics, therapy, support groups.

Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.

Why would foam bats be dangerous to throw into a hockey arena? Have you ever been to a hockey game? They wear all kinds of protective equipment. Throwing foam bats at them would probably not hurt that much, if at all. Actually sounds like it would be pretty fun.

Alcohol’s effects are immediately visible. It’s hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.

Cannabis use is such a menace to society that people who abuse it *checks notes* feel happier the next morning. The horror!

I get that cannabis isn’t a completely harmless drug, like most drugs legal or otherwise, but “it’s not perfectly safe so it should just keep being criminalized” is a bad take that has an entire history of not working. Legalize it and deal with the problems that crop up. Addiction and drug abuse aren’t new problems, we know how to handle them. And for the yet undiscovered health problems that cannabis might cause, legalizing it will open up avenues for research so we can actually figure out its dangers instead of just writing off all cannabis users as (as another user puts it) “mentally fried idiots” or just repeating the same reefer madness nonsense that’s been going around since the Nixon administration.