Perhaps the misunderstanding came about because you responded to someone asking "what's the big deal?" with a list of perceived negatives whilst barely mentioning any of the positives.First of all, you're hilariously off-the-mark. This is a big misunderstanding. I'm not trying to argue that marijuana should not be legalized. I'm only listing the many points of contention surrounding this issue. These are not my opinions. These are the major talking points surrounding the issue of marijuana legalization.
If you're seriously going to say you weren't arguing that side of the argument, why did you cherry pick an almost surely rhetorical question to list straw man arguments like racism and religion?
Also, you should read your links before posting them. "Addiction is a condition in which the body must have a drug to avoid physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms." (from your first link) What in that definition suggests a difference from what I previously stated? Marijuana can't and won't give you withdrawal symptoms. This is entirely congruent with what I posted. By the way, to illustrate just how little you have read, the quote I just posted was the first line of the first paragraph of the body of the article. Addiction =/= dependency. Nor does addiction equate to habitual use.
The second article is obviously and significantly biased. You quote an NIDA source and marvel at her ability to suggest addiction potential. You've demonstrated that you have the use of higher brain functions; use some of them to apply logic to the situation. One psychologist does not a community make. The article even refers to NORML and medical marijuana advocates as the pro-marijuana lobby, as though such a group is a significant player in medicine or public opinion on the same scale as the pro-gun lobby or pro-life lobby are in their fields of public policy. That implication is patently false, and renders fallacious any claim to be a credible source in my eyes.
At this point I'm disagreeing with you because your first post sounded like you were stating those claims as fact. Especially when you bolded and underlined the claim that marijuana is necessarily addictive. This is simply not true. It can lead to chemical dependence, as any chemical substance can. Everything we ingest from food to medicine to the dirt on your fork is chemical. But to put that into perspective this New York Times article shows a comparison rating of six chemicals with dependency potential. Marijuana ranked lowest. In two separate rankings. Below caffeine.
I get that you're not advocating for prohibition or criminalization, but you're misrepresenting the science by quoting an obviously biased source and I'll not have it. It's a matter of how deep you want to dig, and you didn't even stop to check your source. The NIDA is not an unbiased source by any stretch of the word.
As to your point about alcohol, I don't agree with your characterization of the issue as a net equation. I will agree that we have to spend too much money on treatment and rehabilitation for alcohol poisoning, addiction and abuse. That much is true, and moreover sad. But when you place the cost of highway accidents on the opposite side of an equation from the gross revenue we make on sin taxes, you lose my agreement. People make their own decisions, and if they can't, they're hospitalized. Car crashes involving alcohol are the fault of the drunk driver, not the alcohol. You could just as easily blame the car. Why not make cars illegal? At a certain point, you have to trust that an adult is a rational being capable of self preservation.
