Should marijuana be legal?

Now this is a twist on the slippery slope argument. You really think that some pot head selling extra dope to get himself some free bud is going to start raping and kidnapping when we legalize the stuff? Even if you are talk about some gun toting street thugs, if they are going to do these sorts of things then they are already doing it. There is nothing that will make me believe that because we legalize that people are going to start doing other things to get their rocks off.

I take two issues with this position.

First is this idea that the government is protecting us by keeping it illegal. It's fairly well documented that cannabis has a less harmful effect than alcohol. The government knows this. The DEA knows this. So you have to ask yourself, who are they really protecting?

1) Big pharma
2) The prison industrial complex
3) CIA "cartels"

It can also be debated that it's been kept illegal as an easy method of legally persecuting minorities. After a few decades of the war on drugs, there's quite a bit of hard evidence to suggest that the laws aren't equally enforced.

Secondly, is it really worth imprisoning people who haven't committed a violent crime for the sake of your hypothesis? It doesn't seem right to be willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, at the cost of millions to society, to prevent some of them from maybe doing something worse. Why don't we just make it illegal to yell? Because people who yell are angry, and angry people can be violent.

I just find that entire line of reasoning extremely flawed. The people who grow cannabis are all around us. They are our neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family.

I guess this is a different take on marijuana as a gateway drug...now it's a gateway crime. Their is a huge difference between a criminal and a violent criminal.