If You Smoke Marijuana, You Probably Help Murder Innocent People. Congrats.

Ha ha, hey man, let's get high. It's totally harmless, marijuana, don't you know?

You know where most of that marijuana comes from, right? And you know where your money goes, right? News flash:

Firefighters found six bodies inside a burning car in Tijuana, and 15 people were killed in three separate shootings in another northern Mexican border town besieged by drug violence, authorities said Tuesday. Near Mexico's southern border, meanwhile, the bullet-ridden bodies of eight men suspected to be drug traffickers were found in a Guatemalan frontier town. In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, four bodies were found in a burning compact car's seats and two in the trunk, according to a police report Tuesday. The victims' identities and the motive for the killings were not released, but the Mexican city is on a major route for drugs heading north and has recently seen a wave of violence between warring gangs. The bodies were found Monday night. In Ciudad Juarez, gunmen killed five people at a car wash Tuesday evening, including two brothers who owned the business, said Vladimir Tuexi, a spokesman for the regional attorney general's office.

Ha ha, such harmless fun!

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine being brutally raped, shot in the head, and then tossed unceremoniously into a ditch somewhere? Evidently not, you little shits. This is what your marijuana habit leads to. I'm gonna be real fucking serious and real fucking judgmental for a minute. Why? Because people talk about buying drugs as if it's the most casual, consequence-free thing in the world, and I've had it with it. Strikes me as a bit funny that the people who express such concern about buying from multinational corporations never, ever bring this inconvenient little example up. When drugs are discussed, the conversation is typically: "drugs? yeah, i can do what i want with my body!"

So, if you have ever purchased marijuana from a drug dealer, I'd like to tell you a few things:

1. It's quite possible that marijuana came to you from Mexico. If it did, you probably gave the gangsters a couple of bullets that are now resting in some rotting corpse somewhere. Thanks, bro. Hope you had a good time.
2. If you don't want to keep funding fun stuff like murder and rape, please stop buying from drug dealers.
3. Yes, this means no buying marijuana unless you are sure it doesn't come from drug gangs. Today, this usually means buying only those illegal drugs that you made or that were made by someone you know personally. If that's impossible, then you can't buy drugs at all. Too tough for you? Then either your brain is too small to appreciate even the simplest moral arguments, or you completely lack self-control.*

This post is related, if not in content then at least in spirit.

*If you're addicted, that's another story. If you argue that the more we buy drugs and the more violence we create, the more the government will be pressured to legalize drugs and thus reduce violence, you're smarter than I thought you were. (And if you then make a Singerian argument that not spending all your money on drugs is morally equivalent to murder, then you're way smarter than I thought you were.) I don't quite agree with you, but it is an intelligent counterblaste.

Nothing in this post is to be construed as an argument for not legalizing marijuana, which would solve all these problems. Marijuana should be made entirely legal, along with a lot of drugs. At the age of 18, I should be able to walk into a store, buy hashish, and sit outside and smoke it. The illegality (and the violence, which obviously stems from the illegality) is indeed the fault of the government. While marijuana is illegal, however, buying it usually funds drug lords, so I contend that buying it is usually immoral. And I have utterly no moral objections to responsible marijuana use, nor do I think the world would be a worse place if everyone were smoking marijuana. (In fact, in some ways it would probably be a better place.)