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Argument: Marijuana is the drug for life's losers
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- Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). "On the Legalization — or Not — of Marijuana." New York Times, Freakenomics. October 30, 2007 - "The reason that marijuana is, and should remain, illegal is that the drug itself is harmful to the individual and to the community. This is the assessment of the medical and the law enforcement community. Increasingly, this is the assessment of young people as well, since marijuana use has plummeted by 25 percent over the past five years. Young people apparently agree with Australian researchers, who recently characterized marijuana, based on their comparative studies of youths who used versus those who did not, as 'the drug for life’s losers.' Removing legal penalties would only make this drug more accessible, its use more prevalent, and its damage more widespread, and would swell the number of those at risk for becoming 'life’s losers.'"
- Barrett Duke. "Don’t Decriminalize Marijuana". The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Oct 27, 2006 - "Decriminalizing marijuana possession is a bad idea. I used drugs for the first time when I was 14 years old. I still remember that day. It was a day that changed my life, but it wasn’t a change for the better. After my first introduction to drugs, I spent the next seven years of my life in a drug-induced stupor. By the time I was 21, I had no interests except to find ways to get high. Drugs dominated my life and the decisions I made.
- The first drug I used was hashish, essentially a concentrated form of marijuana, but marijuana was the mainstay of my drug use because it was relatively inexpensive and readily available. Marijuana is the drug that kept me high between the availability of other drugs. As a longtime user of the drug, I can attest to its completely destructive force. A person who is high on marijuana has no interest in doing anything. The debilitating effects of marijuana are more severe than those of alcohol."