One of the arguments against “medical marijuana” is that if you set up a dispensary, crime will go up in the area. Lo and behold:

San Francisco’s Marijuana Dispensaries Still Don’t Cause Crimes, Study Shows

Well… duh. If you make a popular substance illegal (and, let’s face it, for no better reason than “just because”), you will make a lot of law-abiding citizens into criminals in the process. Decriminalizing the substance is hardly likely to do anything but *reduce* crime.

Some argue that if you decriminalize pot, more people will smoke pot. Well, maybe. And if more people smoke pot, then more people will need money to *buy* pot, and thus they’ll commit crimes to get that money. Ummm. But if pot is legalized, then the *new* pot smokers will be the people who didn’t smoke it before because it was *illegal.* So the new pot smokers will be people even less likely to commit crimes than the people you have now decriminalized.

If you want to have a law that would put an adult in prison for doing something that harms nobody else, you damned well better have a good reason for that law, backed up with a *lot* of hard evidence.