"Reefer Madness:  Legal & Moral Issues Surrounding the Medical Prescription of Marijuana"

{Read the article by clicking here. This requires Acrobat Reader.}

 (Bioethics, volume 14, issue 1, January 2000)
Abstract

         California and Arizona have recently legalized medical marijuana.  I argue that even given modest assumptions, and granting political conservatives some contentious claims, the federal government ought to drastically change its policy regarding medical marijuana.  I defend this claim against several objections.  I then go on to argue that given the intransigent position of the federal government on this issue, state governments are justified in unilaterally legalizing medical marijuana.  This justification is closely analogous to justifications of civil disobedience.
         A large portion of this paper consists of an extensive response to the objection that legalizing medical marijuana will ‘send the wrong message' — which I take to be primary impediment to legalization.  I argue that legalization is justified even if it were to significantly increase recreational use, and even if the negative consequences outweighed the positive consequences of legalization.

        Moral theorists and games theorists are both interested in situations where rational agents are called upon to constrain their future actions and cooperate with others instead of being free riders.  These theorists have constructed a variety of hypothetical games which illuminate this problem of constraint.  In this paper, I draw a distinction between 'behavior games' like the Newcomb paradox and 'disposition games' like Kavka's toxin puzzle, a prisoner's dilemma, and Parfit's hitchhiker example.  I then employ this distinction to argue that agents who subscribe to the orthodox theory of rationality do significantly better in disposition games than those who subscribe to revisionist theories like David Gauthier's, while revisionists do marginally better in behavior games.  I argue that because of agents' ability to manipulate their own weakness of will, orthodox agents do better at all of these games than had previously been thought.  And, by elucidating the distinction between behavior games and disposition games, I uncover the virtues that underlie the success of each theory of rationality.
 
 

        In this article I point out two important ambiguities in the paradox.  One concern when the player finds out about the game, and the other concerns what counts as an answer to the paradox.  I draw an analogy to Parfit's hitchhiker example which explains why some people are tempted to claim that taking only one box is rational.  I go on to claim that although the ideal strategy is to adopt a necessitating disposition to take only one box, it is never rational to choose only one box.  I defend my answer against the alternative analysis of the paradox provided by David Gauthier, and I conclude that his understanding of the orthodox theory of rationality is mistaken.  I conclude that the rational action for a player in the Newcomb Paradox is taking both boxes, but that rational agents will usually take only one box because they have rationally adopted the disposition to do so.

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