Personal freedom and marijuana

The argument

This argument sets the empirical question largely aside and treats legalisation as a matter of who gets to decide. Its factual premise is modest: marijuana use has limited negative effects, both on the person using it and on those around them. That premise matters because the standard justification for prohibiting a substance is harm, either to the user, severe enough that the state is entitled to intervene for their own sake, or to third parties, who have not consented to bear it. If the harms are limited on both counts, the usual grounds for intervention are weak, and the question of who decides becomes the only question left. On that question, proponents hold that the decision belongs to the adult concerned. What a person puts in their body is the clearest case there is of a choice whose consequences fall principally on the person making it. An adult who is treated as competent to make decisions about their diet, their medical treatment, their recreation, and the risks they accept in any of these is competent to make this one as well. Consistency has some force here too: the state already permits adults to consume substances whose effects it does not pretend are harmless. The conclusion is therefore about the limits of state authority rather than about the merits of marijuana. It should not be the state's prerogative to police this, and a government that dictates what people can and cannot put in their own bodies is not protecting anyone from a serious harm but overriding a judgement its citizens are entitled to make for themselves. As a matter of personal liberty, adults should be able to choose, and recreational marijuana should be legal.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Characterisations of marijuana as harmless are far from conclusive. It can have effects on mental health, lead to lung problems, and be addictive. It is not at all unusual for the government to restrict or outlaw completely harmful products such as some weapons or drugs. This is protecting public safety rather than infringing on personal liberties.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] It cannot be conclusively stated that marijuana has negative effects. [Rejecting P2] The government regularly dictates what people can and cannot do for their own safety, it is not an infringement of liberties to do so in this case also.