What's the real question? Is it "why are their laws?" or is it just "why won't the government let us smoke whatever we want?" . Laws, rules, regulations, or whatever you want to call them are a pretty basic principle of society, all societies. Every culture in the world, whether here in the U.S or some Yamamoto tribe in the jungles of the Amazon, has some set of predetermined code of conduct. And humans aren't alone; a pack of wolves, a pride of lions, even bees all have "rules", albeit simple ones, of how they can behave in their own groups.

Why have rules? The basic answer is to protect us from each other. We may think a society without rules would be paradise but would it really? What you may want is to be able to smke weed whenever you want(I'd like that too) but not everybody wants that. "No problem" you say "they don't have to smoke it". Sounds simple, but what if Big Bubba across the street doesn't want to smoke weed, what he wants to do is bust down your door and feed you his salami, repeatedly. There's no rules, nothing to say he can't, so...open wide.

So, the real question is not whether or not there should be rules and laws, there should be, but who decides what the rules are and what those rules will be. make it legal brings up a good point about those rules that only effect ourselves. Smoking weed for example, it doesn't hurt anyone else if I smoke weed so why should there be a law against it.

While I totally agree that marijuana should be legal, what about other drugs. Should heroin, for example, be legal? Should we be allowed to let ourselves become addicted to a drug that can seriously ruin our lives if we want to? We'll only be hurting ourselves right? But what if our addiction causes us to lose our job, become homeless, etc? Does society have a responsibilty to take care of us? If they do, then is our heroin addiction really just hurting ourself?

The social security example is another good one. "People should have the freedom to budget their own money for when they get older and not have the government do it for them." Sounds great. But what about those that can't. I work with a chick that can't budget for shit. Seriously, the chick is 37 years old, has no savings, and has a credit card debt that could fund the war in Iraq. There's no way she could budget for her old age. What happens when she gets old and can't work anymore? She's single and has no kids. Who's gonna take care of here? If we say the government shouldn't make us pay social security then we should also accept the fact that, if we fuck it up for ourselves, nobody's gonna bail us out.

That, my friends, is the real reason why the government makes laws against the so called "victimless crimes". They don't really give a damn whether or not we fuck ourselves up. They just don't want to have to deal with it when we do.

Just something to think about :stoned: