Club,
Oh I think it is possible, there are ways kids can be isolated from these influences..it happens every day. It takes a great effort and a high cost to do so from a time perspective but for sure if the environment is set properly these influences can be reduced to a large degree.
Same goes in the opposite direction, if controls are poor then the influences can be greater.
There are choices that can be made to protect our youth and costs that come with those choices.
An example for me specifically is where we live there are some super large high schools that are new and have some great benefits...but these same schools have issues with drugs, peer grouping etc etc and that is well known and is a problem. So when the time comes (and unfortunately it is coming sooner than I like) we have decided to take a different path for high school to avoid these influences and rather will take the time and spend the money to attend a school with a smaller campus, college focused and less influenced socially from these issues.
I dont like the "there is no way to" approach, and I also for sure do not agree that wide social acceptance means less peer pressure, in fact to me it means more exposure and more risk. I think we for sure look at things from a different perspective, I do not think there is even close to the commensurate social benefit to outweigh the social cost of wide acceptance of pot.
The topic of police and taxpayers, that isnt really even the point to me. These exist now, we have police we have prisons we have courts..these are not due to pot only or exclusively.
Also, I will never get past the issue of smoking pot...smoking pot is dangerous on its own, there is no way of side stepping this point, smoking ANYTHING is dangerous and a health concern and rationalizing that vs cigs or cloves or basil or any plant that can e dried makes no sense to me. Smoking is harmful period, plus there is more than enough evidence out there that shows the toxicity of the chemicals in pot multiply the issue (in a similar way to saying that unfiltered vs filtered etc).
So I cant get past the issue of smoking, nothing else really matters about police, taxpayers etc...I cannot and will not personally accept the legalization of smoking pot and the harm it does to the body.
Extract the benefit, use that to help in ways it does, outside that I dont see any reason to allow it at all.