My Thoughts Only (Willing to Change)
I want to argue with someone.
By argue, I mean I want to show someone why they’re wrong and why people who think like me are right.
Here’s my claim: Marijuana is not medicine (but it has medicinal properties).
If you believe everyone should get free healthcare orchestrated by the federal government, then you should agree that marijuana is not medicine. Because healthcare is a service, not a good. People provide healthcare. Marijuana, like pharmaceutical drugs, is a good. You can either purchase marijuana freely, or it can be provided to you in a “healthcare” package as “medicine” (i.e., you need a prescription for it). (And in that last sentence, “package” refers to regular doctor visits, antibiotics, ER visits, perhaps women’s hygiene products, etc. – all of which include human labor, or are created by human labor.)
If marijuana is medicine, it is not like fruit or flowers (or else they, too, are medicine); it is like Vicodin or the Flu Shot. It must be provided to you because you cannot do it / get it yourself. Free healthcare means that the entire nation pools its money and pays for the human labor associated with providing “healthcare.” This, of course, includes “medicine.”
We need not pool our money to provide marijuana
– it grows straight out of the ground and the industry is plenty profitable to pay the costs associated with whatever compliance checks the public demands. Oversight need be no more stringent than, for example, the beer brewing and distribution process.
