Phelps Suspension

Olympic phenom Michael Phelps was recently suspended by USA swimming for three months for the now infamous photo of him, apparently, using a bong to use marijuana, now popularly termed "Bonggate."

What does this have to do with politics? Simple: this is folly. The legal prohibitions of such substances as marijuana have done nothing to prevent their consumption by various members of society. According to the World Health Organization, over 40 percent of American adults will have used marijuana for non-medicinal purposes in their life time. Now I am not willing to commit a blatant argumentum ad populatum fallacy and assert that because so many people use it, it should be legal. However, what I am willing to assert is that like alcohol prohibition before it, marijuana prohibition has failed to prevent consumption of that which it was meant to reduce.

The benefits of marijuana legalization have been explored, explained, and expounded upon by far wiser and better minds, and they are too numerous to fully cover here. But those benefits alone pale in comparison to a simple principle:

Marijuana consumption by an individual is an individual's choice which leads to no harm save for the person that would consume it. And even then, many people assert that that assertion is flawed. Even if it were not, it is known that alcohol and tobacco are two of the deadliest substances on this Earth, yet they remain legal. Far more deadly, and dependance forming than marijuana, according to the chart of dependance and harm, according to the British medical Journal, Lancer's chart of drug categorization.

In essence, this argument boils down to the famous English philosopher, John Stuart Mill's harm principle. Unless an act causes concrete harm to another person, we ought not to even concern ourselves with it, let alone seek to prohibit it by force.