Colby caught me! A very kind response to my posts on health care and drug legalization.

I'm feeling backwards today, so I'll touch on a few of the drug legalization points first.

First, let me admit that I don't care about marijuana legalization because I don't care about marijuana. It's a dumb drug -- that is, it makes me feel dumb -- and it's an inhalant; I don't like inhalants. Maybe in a different universe where pot was legal, I would have developed expensive tastes for fancy weed, as I have for beer and coffee in this one. But I haven't.

When talking about the stoners on Whyte and the innocent passerby, I was considering a hypothetical example of an extremely sensitive person exposed to aerosol intoxicants. I've certainly never had a contact high worth mentioning.

Since Colby blows off the slippery slope claim, I'm assuming he hasn't read Eugene Volokh's treatise on the subject. So let me enumerate a couple of slippery slope consequences of legalization that I am concerned about.

Once pot is legalized, and home growing is legal, it will not be practical to re-criminalize. Once the knowledge and the seeds are widely distributed, as Colby ponts out, all you need are water and dirt (don't you need electricity-sucking grow lights too?). If legalization turns out to be an error, it will be too late to reverse it.

Once pot is legalized, pot advertising will be protected commercial speech. Perhaps that's not such a big problem here in Canada, where restrictions on tobacco advertising are pretty common. In the U.S., however, the position is less clear. Volokh argues persuasively in his paper that the U.S. supreme court would regard prohibiting advertisement of a legal product as unconstitutional (section II E).

What's wrong with that, you might ask? Governments make irrevocable decisions all the time -- carrying out the death penalty, for one. And certainly the court should grant equal protection to all industries; I'd be pissed if the computer software industry was singled out as not being allowed to advertise its dangerous, addictive products. (Oh wait, we already are: here, here.)

Public outside pot smoking areas, separated by a fence? Coming soon to a concert or fringe theater event near you. Smoking, non-smoking, or pot-smoking restaurant sections? Possible, but since I don't smoke I can't tell you if it would be annoying for someone to light up the other substance in my presence. What about etiquette and hospitality rules? We're probably doing pretty well on those, since we have rules for offering smokes, declining smokes, and even requesting that you not smoke in my presence, thankyouverymuch. But I would expect some change, at least to change the offer words to "Have a cigar, cigarette, blunt?"

These are some of the conservative objections. Perhaps they sound shallow, but it's the conservative's job to stand around saying "No! No! No! Don't do that!" to social change, even if the justification turns out to just be "We fear change." The system works pretty well now, doesn't it? I mean, if Colby can claim that a SIZEABLE number of people are growing and rolling their own without molestation by the forces of the law, then why explicitly legalize? Do you expect the Canadian federal government will return the money saved by enforcement cuts to us in tax cuts? If so, I have some fine beachfront property for you in Saskatoon...

But really, what we're getting at is the deeper question, rather two questions: (a) when do people need to be protected from themselves and (b) when is it appropriate for government to do it? The libertarian answer to (b) is "Never" so I guess I'm not one of those. I'll have to come back to this later, as I too have work and a meeting today, but next time I want to talk about gambling; also health care and education.