David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Klein are having a debate about whether or not marijuana use could have had an effect on the Tucson shooting by aggravating the shooter's potential schizophrenia.
The Center for Disease Control cites 79,000 alcohol-related deaths a year between 2001-2005. But we don't ban alcohol because the one time we tried, it resulted in higher rates of violence, organized crime, and a plethora of other negative externalities. Alcohol use is also the most common addiction of people with schizophrenia. The evidence that marijuana causes schizophrenia isn't very strong; the original article he links to notes that "[f]or as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population," despite increased marijuana use in general.
All of which suggests that even if marijuana use played some role in the Tucson shooting by exacerbating the potential mental illness of the shooter, we should be focusing on preventing the mentally ill from succumbing to substance abuse, not on broad-based marijuana prohibition, which is costly and pointless.
I'm not completely sold on full legalization/commercialization, but wasting law-enforcement resources on pot smokers strikes me as a waste of time. In 2008, half of all drug arrests were for marijuana-related offenses. How much safer does that make anyone really feel? Does anyone really think we need to crack down more on marijuana to stop another Tucson from happening?
