The continued prohibition of marijuana is far more harmful than the drug itself.

I apologize to not be able to put as much effort in to this posts as previous, you and the voters can go ahead and hold this against me, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch in real life. You say the prohibition of alcohol "didn't work out too well", but how do you see the prohibition of marijuana as working out any better? You say the statistics show it's easier for kids to get beer and cigarettes than marijuana, but the point is it's easy to get all 3. Prohibition has not significantly curbed it's usage or availability. I brought up my comparison to alcohol not to assert the original argument, but to counter your statement that "I have shown why all your evidence that suggest that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, is inconclusive at best, an, for the most part, blatantly wrong." As I showed in my last argument, marijuana is far far less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. Even the source you sited put the annual death toll at 667, 187 when marijuana was the only drug reported. A far cry from 75,000. Marijuana as a painkiller is the most useless comment ever? Are you serious? Chronic pain is one of the most common uses of medical marijuana.(1)(2)(3) And I mentioned that medical marijuana doesn't increase youth usage to point out that California, where marijuana is a just about as easy for adults to get as beer, that this didn't increase youth usage. You still have yet to give a convincing argument for why it SHOULD be illegal, and have simply tried to say my statements apply to drugs that they are not being applied to. That "most ridiculous argument ever" is already applied to about every dangerous legal activity. There's plenty activities that aren't criminalized even though a small minority can have negative societal consequences. We should keep driving illegal because a minority get in car accidents? We should make junk food illegal because a small minority eat themselves to death? We should make guns illegal because a small minority goes on shooting sprees? You counter my arguments saying they can apply to anything, but I am weighing the consequences of marijuana alone. Any law regarding the misuse of something has to weigh the negative with the positive. The only negative you still have come up with is the conflicting evidence on health risks, a connection to lower academic performance, and a higher adolescent use rate. The first two are no grounds to criminalize things, as the first applies to meat, fast food, playing football, alcohol, and driving cars, and the second applies to television, and video games.(5) The adolescent use rate of 28% is still lower, and it's been semi-legal since the 70s. With no conclusive evidence to suggest a significant spike in use, all of those arguments are pointless. The fact still remains that huge tax revenue, thousands of jobs, more focus on hardER drugs, less tax dollars fighting an impossible war, less responsible users denied basic rights, less money funneled to crime, and less access to a black market outweigh those few negatives. While these things apply do harder drugs, they do not outweigh their much heavily costs to both the user and those around him. (1)http://www.disabled-world.com... (2)http://www.drugpolicy.org... (3)http://backandneck.about.com... (4)http://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz... (5)http://media.www.westerncourier.com...