Dr. Robert L. DuPont Needs to Smoke More Often

Ok, so I know I already discussed this article last week, but I think it deserves more deep delving. Last week I was mainly interested in the thought experiment. This week I am going to focus on the comments of one Dr. Robert L. DuPont chief Moron of the Department of the Anti-Marijuana Propaganda, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health, and former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

I am sure Dr. DuPont is a relatively reasonable and intelligent man on other issues, however he seems to have thrown logic out the window in his statement of support of the prohibition of marijuana. He uses the analogy of speeding, stating that "Legalization of marijuana would solve the marijuana problem the way legalizing speeding would solve the speeding problem: it would remove the legal inhibition of a dangerous behavior, and thereby encourage the behavior." His entire statement is hinged on this analogy, but yet he doesn't once support his claim that marijuana is actually harmful to an individual or to society as a whole. If you are going to claim that something is a danger to society you had better be able to support it, especially if you are going to throw away citizens rights in order to prohibit a substance or activity, Dr. DuPont completely fails to do this, he advocates continuing a failing drug war because pot is "bad" but seems to refuse to state WHY pot is bad.

He then goes on to imply that youth would have more access to marijuana if it were legalized without any thing backing up the claim. He states, "We have not done a good job of keeping alcohol and cigarettes out of the hands of young people." I'd like to pose the question to Dr. DuPont of, what of the 2002 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) stating that teenagers have an easier time getting marijuana then alcohol. If we are doing a worse job now at keeping marijuana out of the hands of youth don't you think that we should maybe regulate marijuana in a more logical way?