“Agreed: legalize, regulate and tax. The Romans did so with their sex industry and it worked beautifully.”

Years ago, I wouldve agreed but look what happened to Rome.
What I’m saying is, perhaps there could be a middle ground.

so while I do not really care if that idiot wants to kill himself, I do not want to pay for it and if his wearing a helmet saves the community some $ - then I am all for it.

It’s time people were treated like adults able to make their own decisions and forced to deal with the consequence of them.

But seat belt and helmet laws I can sorta see the point to. If I didn’t have to pay for it, I wouldn’t care. But I -do- pay for it, in the form of higher insurance premiums and government medical payments because you snapped your spinal cord and need to pay someone to wipe your ass for the rest of your life. They could put a rider on the policy saying that they won’t pay for anything if you’re not wearing seat belts/helmets, but that’s wide open for abuse by the insurance companies.

Same thing with smoking. I don’t care if you light up. They’re your lungs, not mine. But the no smoking laws are not for the benefit of the smoker - they’re for the benefit of the non-smoker who has no choice about breathing in the second-hand smoke. And get rid of the tobacco subsidies. The tobacco farmers can charge more to make up for it, and they’ll get it. Their customer base is addicted.

This comes up nightly at our house as we watch on the news how the baby rapers walk out of jail to re-offend practically every 3 months and yet we insist on imprisoning people calmly enjoying a bong and some good music with friends and several bags of Cheetos if they happen to have too much in their pockets (the green stuff, not the Cheetos). Why is that?

Now, if someone is drunk/high while driving and endangering the rest of us - off to jail. Ditto if you break into my house or steel guard rails to sell the metal for meth money. Meth might be one I’d still like to see banned because the meth turds do historically and habitually screw with other people - that pisses me off. Pot smokers don’t tend to be like that - if anything there’s likely to be less of any kind of a reaction. If they thought about robbing your house, they might giggle a little, forget what they were thinking, remember, giggle some more, eat another fistful of Cheetos, take another hit, hang out, maybe fall asleep or just feel really, really mellow, man.

In any case, V’s right on this one. The government has way more important things to do than to care about what we do to ourselves when it’s not harming anyone else.

And I’m all about what rbf2000 had to say, too. Even better.

Aside from the jobs it would create in the federal govt, it would legitimize the efforts of the poor bastard farmers in Pakistan and other places: the US comes in and destorys their poppy fields and they have no other means of income so they start growing poppies again… they should have the right to do that legally and without US interference, shouldn’t they?

The drug industry is such a big one, there’s so much money the government is missing out on, all because they have a stick shoved too far up their ass to be a bit progressive.