Marijuana has repeatedly been proven to NOT cause cancer, heart disease, brain damage, liver disease, emphysema, or any other significant health issue, and its addiction potential is about on par with coffee. In all respects, marijuana is far safer than beer and wine and should, at the very least, be controlled by exactly the same laws that we use for alcohol.
Our current marijuana prohibition empowers drug dealers and the Mexican drug cartels by preventing any form of legal competition to their activities. Instead of protecting children from marijuana, these laws create an environment of zero legal supply amidst massive and unrelenting demand and effectively serve to make our children LESS safe. It is *because* of the failings of the prohibition that our children now have easier access to marijuana than to alcohol! Our communities need legal adult marijuana sales for exactly the same reason that they need legal alcohol and tobacco sales - to keep unscrupulous black-market criminals away from our neighborhoods and our children.
Parents work hard to keep drugs away from their children and they need effective, logic-based laws to help them with this. In order to greatly improve the safety of our children we need legal adult marijuana sales in gas stations and supermarkets at prices too low for drug dealers to match - just as beer and wine are sold today. Our laws must be based on logic, fact and reason, and NOT on ideological positions and unprovable assumptions!