Secondary smoke is the main issue with cigarettes. Research shows that this harms people who are in the area not smoking. I don't know what the research says about secondary marijuana smoke. I assume there are issues there too.
There certainly are. Smoking marijuana in public should be banned, just like smoking tobacco in public should be -- keep it to your private house. Of course, tobacco addicts are often *SO SEVERELY ADDICTED* that they can't wait until they get home for their next "hit", which creates problems. Many people addicted to other drugs can wait 'till evening for their next hit.
Nicotine is almost as addictive as heroin, and much more addictive than cocaine. Just for reference! People's assumptions about this stuff, based on decades of *selective* scaremongering by the Drug Enforcement Administration (which has often been headed by alcohol and tobacco addicts) are just wrong. Tobacco, being an assortment of highly effective insect poisons (very few insects eat the tobacco plant), is extra-specially nasty, although purified nicotine by itself isn't too bad. (So addicts really should switch to the patch or the gum.)
Fact is, I'm a teetotaler, I stay away from recreational drugs stronger than sugar, and I would probably have been a supporter of Prohibition back in the 1890s. But *we already tried Prohibition in the 1920s and it backfired*. We tried Prohibiting one of the worst, nastiest, most awful drugs on the market -- alcohol, which induces violent, criminal rages in a significant fraction of the population -- and Prohibition just didn't work, and it created powerful crime syndicates.
We've now repeated this with marijuana. Pretty much anyone can get marijuana (just like anyone could get alcohol in the 1920s), it's funding giant crime syndicates, and it's giving the police an excuse for selective enforcement, constitutional violations, and general abusive behavior.
If we legalize marijuana but not other popular drugs, however, we'll just go through the same wasteful Prohibition cycle again with the next drug...
We need to stop repeating the mistakes of the past and try something which has a chance of actually reducing addiction and abuse rates. I personally think it would be ideal to legalize the drugs, tax them, and ban advertising completely -- but apparently current interpretations of the First Amendment make the advertising ban hard to do in the US.
IMHO if you legalize some of this stuff you cut out the criminal element. Then the government could tax it and control the distribution. IMHO the crimes associated with drug dealmg is worse than the drugs themselves.
Indeed, the prohibition black market provides tremendous opportunities for violent criminals to move in on the market and profit. Just like it did for Al Capone. (The opportunities for corruption are also massive. There have actually been persistent stories about DEA officers being involved with drug smuggling rings.) Bring it all into the sunlight and it becomes possible to stamp out the worst "associated behavior".
As for the smaller-scale problems of drug addicts robbing people to feed their habit, alcohol and tobacco addicts have been known to do this too -- occasionally people even steal money for coffee -- and those drugs are still legal.
There have been "drug busts" my entire life and as far as I can tell the drugs are more common than they were when I was a kid. It's not working.
We spend Billions on Phoney Wars on Vice and the Crime Syndicates, (now called Cartels) , Prison Industry and Corrupt Government Officials get Rich and the Beat Goes on!
