>I don't know how many lives marijuana ruins, except maybe out of laziness or lack of motivation. Depending on your definition of 'ruin'- a lot. As a counterp

>I don't know how many lives marijuana ruins, except maybe out of laziness or lack of motivation. Depending on your definition of 'ruin'- a lot. As a counterpoint - alcohol consumption is in most cases self-limiting, for the reasons you describe. Your body tells you in fairly clear terms that you're imbibing poison. Most people learn not to over-indulge, particularly as their tolerance drops off towards the end of their 20s. Marijuana, however, is more subtle. You won't have a raging headache the next day - but you will be slower, less motivated, and less socially skilled. These negative effects are not painful, and depending on how demanding your daily activities are, possibly imperceptible. If you're an intelligent person stuck in a boring situation, it might even make your experience more tolerable. And, because weed makes you lazy and weed is a lazy solution to boredom, it traps people in a vicious cycle. They're not lying in the gutter, blacking out or vomiting, so they think they're doing fine; but their life devolves into doing a boring job to pay the bills, and smoking weed to make themselves stupid to relieve the boredom. They never hit "rock bottom" in the alcoholic sense, so they circle the drain for the rest of their lives. It's not "cool" these days to say the marijuana is a dangerous drug that ruins lives - ridiculous over-the-top propaganda saw to that. But it is, and our "cultural antibodies" need to catch up to the new reality of legal weed. I've definitely known a few people for whom alcohol became a visible, functional problem - but I've known at least dozens of people who could have achieved so much more if only they'd managed to tear themselves away from weed's anesthesia. None of this is to say that banning is the answer to anything. But the right of legal weed comes with the responsibility of owning up to its problems.