Legalization of Recreational Marijuana

Hello and my apologies. I want to thank my opponent for staying professional. Regardless, you should know that changing the topic midway is frowned up generally and so I would ask voters to null this as you did not know. I now move to argue your new point: To restate the new resolution, my opponent states that he is pro for "Marijuana should be legal in a private setting". I will be against this resolution. 1. In a private setting, it can be agreed that this would generally help stop the use of marijuana in public. 2. "If one is found under the influence while driving they should receive an extremely harsh punishment. I believe the punishment for drunk driving should also be severely increased, but that is a different argument." This I can agree with also. This is also already happening but drunk and high driving still happens anyway. My point is that while these punishments are severe, people will do it as long as it is legal and even when it isn't. Making it legal just makes people feel more at ease with doing it and more often leading to more problems. 3. Moving marijuana to a private setting still affects the rest of society. This has to do with the, "If you are not with us, you are against us" type thing. If someone is not contributing to society they are detrimental to society. People smoking marijuana, even privately, still affects our society negatively. Let me paint a picture for you. Let us say there is a man who owns a private piece of property and can smoke marijuana. He then has a party on his private land. Then all the people there are smoking marijuana. These people are influencing society by showing people that smoking marijuana is okay as long as you do it in the right place. It is the same as trying to prove that alcohol has a positive affect on society. Just because it is legal does not make it good. Drinking mainly happens in clubs, bars, etc. and in the home. Alcohol is still one of the number one killers in America, right next to smoking Tobacco. Making marijuana legal only validates peoples belief that they should do whatever they want because they are "only doing it to themselves." The fact of the matter is they are not. When they crash into someone's car and kill a parent's children, they are not just hurting themselves. Expounding on that, most drunk or high drivers survive car crashes because their body is in a relaxed state and so the muscles are not contracted, making bleeding slower and causing less damage. Therefore, they are hurting others more than themselves. Let us look at this in a different way. Welfare. People on marijuana have slower brain capacity because of its affect on the brain. This directly affects your paycheck in modern society. The higher paying the job, the more you need to know. If you can't know things because of marijuana and so get minimum wage, suddenly you find yourself needing welfare to pay for expenses as well as your intake of marijuana. Suddenly, the American tax dollar is supporting someone who is legally addicted to drugs and will continue to do so as long as they can. Making marijuana only legal in a private setting does little but encourage the use of marijuana, legally and illegally.