Martin, you said: "Doing something illegal while someone is not watching in your home is just plain flaunting the law."

Uh-huh. And we all do that...sometime, somewhere...in some way that we consider minor and not terribly significant. We exceed the speed limit. We park in a no-parking spot. We fail to entirely accurately report our income taxes. We litter. We fail to report something else. We fail to obey some little statute somewhere, because it's momentarily inconvenient or we don't have the time or...whatever.... Find me a person who has never just plain flouted the law and I'll find you a three-headed Venusian dragon. Police flout the law. Politicians, judges, and priests flout the law. The law is an ass, Martin, an inflexible bunch of imperfect BS created by some bureaucrats in an office somewhere to try to manage an infinitely complicated and ever-changing social situation...but it's certainly better than NO law! :-) I'll vouch for that. It is not, however, infallible, and neither are we, and no one should expect us to be.

Like you, Martin, I'm against all that cancer-causing smoke, whether it be tobacco or pot. I'm also against stupid people going to bars, getting plastered, acting rowdy, and reeling out at 1 AM and creating noise on the street and acting like idiots. I'm against people eating junk food, getting overweight, and dying 20 years too soon of a heart attack. I'm against most rap music and most music videos. I'm against the crap music on commercial radio. I'm against the marketing of bimbos like Britney Spears. I'm against aggressive drivers who show no regard to anyone else on the road and won't let people into traffic. I'm against selfishness, boorishness, and gross laziness. I'm against people sitting around in smelly old undershirts all day, drinking beer, and watching football while ignoring their long-suffering wives and children. I'm against workaholism...which has killed way more people and ruined more lives than pot ever will.

But I do not propose enacting laws prohibiting people from personally engaging in all of the above activities for the simple reason that such laws would be basically unworkable and counterproductive, AND the suppression of people's right to use their own free will and judgement over their own lives...as are the laws persecuting marijuana users.

My way of dealing with all those things I listed above is simple. I don't do them.

I leave other people alone to work out their own life-maturing process in their own fashion. If they want to be idiots I can live with it. The World will always contain a fair number of idiots.

That's called: "live and let live" It ain't always easy, but it's better than the alternative, believe me. The alternative is a police state with enforced conformity at the point of a gun.