I am not saying that marijuana should be legal just because alcohol is legal, anymore than I’d say heroin should be legal just because alcohol is legal. What I’m saying is that if alcohol is legal – despite the relative harm that it causes – then either marijuana – which has not been proven to be more harmful – should also be legal or alcohol should be illegal. Since there is virtually no chance of alcohol ever being illegal again in this country, then I support legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana to make the application of the law just and equitable. It’s that simple.
It still doesn’t work. Your claim about just and equitable is nonsense.
IMO, not only is there nothing fallacious about using the same standard in evaluating two different drug laws, it would be fallacious not to do so.
Obviously not.
If what you say is true, then the law allowing aspirin to be sold over the counter while requiring a prescription for codeine would have been tossed decades ago.
Your claim is pure nonsense, and your entire argument rests on that nonsense.
To use your nut analogy (…). Suppose that walnuts were banned because they have shells (harms), but peanuts weren’t banned, even though they also have shells (harms). Do you really think that the Walnut Growers of America wouldn’t prevail in court in seeking to have the law equally applied – by either removing the ban on walnuts or instituting a ban on peanuts too? Would you think that the court had fallen victim to an obvious fallacious argument?
We already have different laws regulating different, although similar, products.
The proof of that is self-evident.
We have thousands of laws that treat different products differently.
To say that we cannot have those laws is just childish nonsense.
There are laws banning the sale of bald eagle feathers. That law has never been declared unconstitutional (or inequitable in any way) just because it’s legal to sell chicken feathers. Two different items, two different laws.
Every state has fishing laws. No one has even successfully argued that a state must have the same laws for trout as it does for bass or sturgeon.
It is illegal to sell lead paint. It is legal to sell water-based paint.
It is illegal to sell asbestos insulation. It is legal to sell fiberglass insulation.
It is (generally) illegal to sell elephant tusks. It’s legal to sell tusks from the common boar.
In some states, it is illegal to sell live rattlesnakes, even though other species of snakes might be sold as pets.
Anywhere one chooses to look in the law, different products or substances are treated differently.
There are millions of products that are illegal to sell for one reason or another.
Again, your claim that products which are similar to each other in some way must be treated the same in the law falls flat on its face. Our laws are full of millions of examples proving that to be untrue.
In our legal system, we have a well-established legal precedent that every drug is
In like manner, if your city decided that it was going to ban Sunday morning church bell ringing by Christian churches because it disturbed the peace, but didn’t also ban an amplified Muslim call to prayers, even though it also disturbed the peace, should the Christian churches acquiesce – because amplified sound is substantively different than church bells – or should they sue for equal treatment? If they sued, wouldn’t they be using essentially the same argument I’m using?
No. They would not be using the same argument.
You are arguing that a government must regulate two very different substances the same just because they happen to have some characteristics in common.
It is nothing like the example you just gave.
People must be treated equally. There is no legal precedent saying that objects must be treated the same way just because they happen to have some characteristics in common.
Of course there’s no question that the two drugs are not equivalent in their delivery methods, appearance or chemical properties. That goes without saying. The question of their moral equivalence would seem to hinge on their relative respective harms. I know that you think that “alcohol, used in moderation is nowhere near as harmful as marijuana, even when used in moderation”. but as far as I know that has not been demonstrated in properly controlled studies and, no offense intended, I am not prepared to take anyone’s word for that. Both drugs cause some degree of harm and while those harms are not precisely equivalent, they seem to be equivalent enough.
That’s all irrelevant because there is no legal principle requiring them to be treated the same in the first place.
The problem with your entire argument is that you have invented some legal principle for nothing more than justifying legalizing marijuana.
There is no basis for it. There is no precedent for it. It’s not based on any accepted definitions of a “just law” from philosophy or theology or law.
The “just law” theory has been around for at least 800 years, going back to St Thomas Aquinas.
There is nothing in that history saying (or even suggesting) that two products must be treated the same way in the law just because those
different products happen to have some characteristics in common.
If your principle were to actually be applied, then it would negate every law ever written in human history that regulates the manufacture, sale, use, distribution, import, export, transport (or whatever else) of anything—
literally anything. Millenia of laws and millennia of legal precedent, going back to the very dawn of law itself, would all be unjust. Millions of laws throughout the world are all unjust laws just because no one else ever heard of your little theory.
