Let's Jail People For Being Fat
JOSH BARRO
David Brooks, Ruth Marcus, and Tina Brown want to keep laws against marijuana. They're aiming at the wrong target. Really, we should legalize marijuana and throw people in jail for being fat.
By Brooks' and Marcus' own admission, marijuana itself doesn't necessarily have such bad effects. They both smoked quite a bit of it back in the day and still managed highly successful careers as national opinion columnists. Really, they are worried about marijuana's negative second-order effects when other people smoke it.
Marcus worries about effects on IQ. Brooks says weed makes people unambitious and distracts them from "the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature." Brown is the most blunt, tweeting that "legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier nation even less able to compete with the Chinese."
Brooks, Marcus, and Brown want to address these negative effects through a regime of criminal penalties that imprisons at least some subset of the people involved in cultivating, distributing and consuming the marijuana that Brooks and Marcus enjoyed so much in the 1970s. (Brown didn't answer my Twitter question about whether she's ever smoked marijuana but, well, she works in publishing, so we can all hazard a guess.)
But why go after marijuana for its second-order effects? Why not just ban stupidity, laziness, obesity, unambitious taste, or whatever social ills are of concern to national opinion columnists? As Brooks asks, "Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture?" If the answer is "one where people are thin," the obvious answer is to ban fatness.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-not-throw-people-in-jail-for-being-fat-2014-1
= new reply since forum marked as read
Some people like the smell of skunk... 
I never smoked it, but I certainly went to enough parties in the 70's and remember there was often a group off in the corner taking part. I thought it smelled a lot better (like autumn leaves burning) than tobacco smoke with all those pesticide additives.
By the way, that group in the corner was usually composed of medical students, young doctors, nurses, and I don't remember any of them being carted off to jail.
One cannot live off Fritos, Oreos, Pringles, and Cheetos for eternity! 
Have you ever reviewed the meal choices in jail? The calorie count is the meal planning goal...thus almost all carbohydrates and the protein is almost always turkey....made to look like another protein. 
Then...limited physical activity....essentially sedimentary activity compounded with boredom. Jail is stressful too....ultimately many choose to by commissary food items that are high in empty, fattening calories....to feel better from the stress.
Jailhouse weight gain is inevitable.
I'm a reasonably fit (for 60-ish, ok) academic research scientist, builder, and artist. Some of those conservatives who fear the personal effects of legal cannabis send their kids to me for a university education.
I'm a lifelong stoner, too. Started smoking cannabis when I was 15 years old, in 1970. Although I've certainly learned the truth of the old saying over the years that "pot will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no pot," by and large I've used cannabis nearly daily for almost 45 years. That is certainly true of the past 25 years, when I've had the means to keep myself in good stash while working in a profession that has utter disdain for things like drug testing. (At this point in my career I don't have any currently open federal grants, so nah nah about all those Reaganesque "drug free workplace" pledges 
.)
The point is that I'm not fat, I'm not stupid, I'm not without personal ambition, and I'm not "sleepy." I don't remember the last time I was actually bored because, in spite of what Mr. Brown might think, I always have half a dozen NEW projects underway simultaneously because I LOVE new challenges. I've been a productive academic and scientist, an innovative teacher whose contributions to the profession are recognized institutionally, a labor activist and officer in my faculty union, and I've had a kick-ass good time doing it, too. I'm not an occasional cannabis user by anyone's definition.
Every. Day. For decades.
Get used to it, America. We're here. We're the drug criminals who give the lie to every half-baked uninformed nonsensical pronouncement about the "moral landscape" of prohibition and the intellectual desert of stonerdom.
I live in California's Emerald Triangle, where obtaining cannabis is trivial, but it is still nominally illegal absent a Prop. 215 certification. That will change very soon. Prohibition is ending, and unlike the repeal of short lived alcohol prohibition, the repeal of cannabis prohibition will do FAR more good than harm.