One of the most embarrassing arguments people make in favor of the legalization of marihuana is, “But what is the difference between pot and alcohol or prescription drugs?” People who make this argument always adopt a triumphant look and seem completely unaware that everybody else in the room is curling their toes in vicarious shame.
The difference between pot and alcohol is precisely the illegality of the former. A negative father complex makes flirting with illegality crucial to the experience of a pot lover. If pot gets legalized, this person will add other anti-social or illegal activities to his or her repertoire.
If, as we discussed earlier, our mother complex answers for our sense of comfort and security in the world, our father complex is responsible for how well we feel as members of society. People with a negative father complex find it hard to make money or construct a career, they constantly have problems in the workplace, laws bother them, figures of authority disturb them. Scratch a Libertarian and you will find a person with a really bad father complex.
Pot-taking is evidence of a father complex that is negative but not to a huge degree (depending, of course, how strongly one feels about the need to take it).
Legalization of pot is a non-issue because the number of addicts or criminal acts will not experience a significant change.
Clarissa's Blog 
“If pot gets legalized, this person will add other anti-social or illegal activities to his or her repertoire”
You and I (and some other readers here) get that but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t.
Some people really need people to disapprove of them and if you expand your circle of tolerance for whatever irritant they’re using at the moment they’ll just find something else to get the hostility they crave.
“Scratch a Libertarian and you will find a person with a really bad father complex”
I guess that’s one reason I’ve never been able to go full L (despite an above average degree of libertarian sympathies but tempered, I like to think, with some realism about human nature). The more ideologically pure a libertarian the more they’re liable to sound like a cranky infant.
LikeLike
I have the same attitude towards pot that I do towards McDonalds. I’m indifferent to it unless a bunch of my friends are going out to get some, in which case I’ll tag along, especially if someone else is paying for it and it’s a late night after partying with not many other options.
Granted, pot probably is less ruinous to your health than McDonalds.
LikeLike
When I was in college my father always asked me if I had tried pot and seemed disappointed that I hadn’t.
LikeLike
I’m not a fan diagnosing people from their political opinions. It’s generally not a good idea to speculate on people’s motivations and present your guess as an argument against their position at all; the amateur psychoanalysis just makes it worse.
LikeLike
I don’t think there is anything that can influence Tea Partiers and Libertarians in the direction of better or worse. They are not even remotely open to argument or discussion which is why I don’t share the fear of antagonizing them. Note also, that they are not in the least concerned about the possibility of antagonizing me.
LikeLike
It’s not that I’m afraid of hurting their feelings. It’s pretty easy to demonstrate why they’re terrible people purely from the things they say. Speculating on their mental health instead of addressing the content of their argument can only leed to a poorer understanding of why their way of thinking is flawed. Or at least an obscured one – I don’t doubt you know why the Tea Party is dangerous, but isn’t it better to combat that threat in practical terms instead of trying to psychoanalylse its members from a layman’s understanding of psychology? What’s the difference between that and “feminists are just angry they don’t get any attention from men” or “gay people just want to destroy traditional family values”?
LikeLike
If my goal with this post were to effect political change, then you are right, this would be the wrong way of going about it. My goal is different, however. I want to spread awareness of the phenomenon I call “negative father complex.” I’m not trying to help Libertarians, god forbid. Libertarians are simply an extreme example that can help those of us who have this problem to a much more limited degree.
LikeLike
I’m in favor of the decriminalization of all drugs for adults.
LikeLike
This makes me wonder about Uncle Joe and why Russians fervently embrace capitalism.
LikeLike
My question here is whether all questioning of authority means negative father complex. For example: disagree with US foreign policy? Negative father complex. Where does it all end?
LikeLike
So long as there are fathers there will be father complexes, but Joe was more rightfully an “uncle”.
LikeLike
Of course, one can have a positive father complex, which is a lovely thing to have. 🙂 A positive mother complex is way cooler, though.
LikeLike
Pegasus complexes exceed both!
LikeLike
No, it’s only the problems with authority when they are coupled with everything else I listed.
LikeLike
If the pro-legalization argument is that legalizing pot will reduce crime, then possibly they are wrong, if pot takers will start running yellow lights. But if the pro-legalization argument is one of consistency, that an activity that doesn’t harm other people and harms the actor only as much as other legal activities, then it is irrelevant whether legalizing pot does not reduce crime. Some people may get a thrill from pot’s illegality, but some people may just like the way it makes them feel.
LikeLike
This cannot possibly be the principle behind any criminal justice system because it would make it completely impossible to prosecute a wide range of crimes, from running a stop sign on an empty road to entering into a conspiracy to commit murder.
LikeLike
Don’t you think that we should start from the principle that if something does no harm to other people it should be legal? From there, we could start restricting activities based on other principles, but we should be able to articulate those principles clearly. In general, I think we should strive to limit what we make illegal, and to aim for consistency.
LikeLike
No, I don’t think so at all because we will get impossibly bogged down in the definitions of harm and other people. And again, really serious crime will remain impossible to prosecute if we wait for harm actually to happen. Right now it’s possibly to put all conspirators in jail before the actual crime happened. With the “harm-based” philosophy, it would not be possible to do anything until the conspirators actually kill or defraud or whatever their crime is.
Drunk driving will be impossible to prosecute, carrying a weapon without a permit – tons of things. This would be a very dangerous, scary world and all for what? To help people pursue their drug addiction?
LikeLike
What? Are you suggesting we put drunk people in jail as a preventative measure so they won’t drive? I don’t understand at all what your saying.
LikeLike
DUI is a crime even when the driver hasn’t actually hit anybody.
LikeLike
We are getting on a crosstown bus here. The issue is whether something should be criminal because it “causes or threatens harm”, or because some people perceive it to be immoral. Professors of the humanities might get bogged down on the meanings of words, but deciding on meanings is part of what judges do. Pot does not cause or threaten harm, any more than alcohol does. To be consistent, both should be legal or both should be illegal.
LikeLike
Yes, judges are so good at deciding on meanings. The recent Hobby Lobby ruling by the most revered judges in the US is a case in point. Corporations are people. Hence they are entitled to practice religion. Hence they are entitled to rummage in female employee’s uteri. Of course, no silly little professor could hope to achieve such heights of logical reasoning. 🙂
I don’t mind in the least pot being legalized. However, I would never go as far as say that pot or alcohol cause no harm. They cause a lot of harm to the users and the co-dependents. My uncle died last month at the age of 53 because of alcoholism.
But this obvious harm is not a reason to ban either alcohol or pot, in my opinion.
LikeLike
If you run a stop sign on an empty road, there will be, by definition, no witnesses, no complaint, and so you will not be prosecuted. I suppose the police could install cameras and charge drivers who run stop signs on country roads in the middle of the night, but that would be a waste of resources, because no one was harmed. If you are charged with a conspiracy to commit murder, then the conspiracy has been carried out, and someone was harmed, or you were arrested before the murder was carried out and harm to someone else was prevented. Fortunately, the police do not have to wait until the crime has actually been committed before they stop it, but they do have to prove that there was a genuine intention to commit the crime, and just knowing about it or talking about it is not enough.
LikeLike