After reading this, I don’t consider these people to be fellow travelers on the road to greater freedom, even though I agree with decriminalization of pot:
The part that really disturbs me is that just last year, Arizona Gov. Brewer signed a law that allows adults 21 and older to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, joining Alaska and Vermont as the only states where any citizen can be legally packing heat in public at a political rally without any sort of registration or training to do so. Â Had Loughner been approached by a police officer and that pistol was found in his pocket, legally there would have been nothing the police could have done.
But if Loughner had a joint in his pocket, police could have arrested him and he may have faced six-to-eighteen months in jail.  If Loughner had been pulled over driving to the rally and a piss test revealed he had smoked a joint last week, he’d be placed into mandatory 24-hour custody and faced six months in jail.
Maybe I’m nuts, but I don’t exactly want people driving around on the nation’s highways drunk or otherwise impaired, whether drugs are legal or not. Either way, the attempt to deflect blame onto other social policies, or onto the use of gun metaphors in political dialog, doesn’t strike me as a productive response to the blame pot smoking is going to take for this guy. It amounts to say “It’s this other freedom’s fault!”
It should be noted that even though there’s some credible science linking marijuana use to an increased risk for developing schizophrenia, the vast majority of people who use marijuana will never develop the disease. There’s been research, however, that shows it can dramatically increase the risk for people with a family history of schizophrenia, so there’s likely a genetic component to it as well.