You are the future. You have opportunities to cure cancer, have a huge impact on poverty and income inequality, save our environment, reduce crime and incarceration and so many other issues.  

You have already won an enormous victory in human rights with marriage equality and you are rightfully proud of that accomplishment. No one was harmed in that enormous change you made to our society and way of life. Freedoms were gained.

However, you are working on another enormous change to society that may be very misguided. You support legalizing drugs, more substances of abuse, falling for the siren call of an industry marketing substances that can ruin lives and rob people of their freedoms of choice.

You are the future. Many of you are working to increase ability to choose to use recreational medicine as a personal choice, calling it Freedom of Choice.  However, it is anything but Freedom. Substances of abuse such as drugs (and that does include marijuana) are not tolerated well by a significant number of individuals. It ruins the lives of some and in the process takes families and friends down with them.

Individuals with substance use disorders LOSE their personal freedoms. They lose their freedom of choice, driven by their increasing need for their drug of choice. They often harm others by their choices.

Millennials – who have the opportunity to change the world for the best — could make an enormous difference by working to reverse the appetite for addictive substances and behaviors and promote getting high from natural behaviors. You would improve mental and physical health of all, decrease child abuse and neglect, decrease crime and incarceration, decrease the demand for black markets, decrease impaired driving and accidents, improve the environment, with likely many more positive outcomes.

Or Millennials can continue their mission of legalizing marijuana, increasing negative impacts on society, impairing your drug using population that will then require you to care for many in their brain disease of addiction or in their very difficult journey of recovery. Dear Millennials, does that mission fit with your ideal future having freedoms of choice?

Sally Schindel, Prescott, Arizona

Please vote NO on Arizona Proposition 205 to legalize recreational marijuana, on its way to the ballot in November 2016.
Educate yourself and your acquaintances about the risks and harms of marijuana use.
My personal story: MomsStrong.org
How to help Arizona defeat this industry – marketing another addictive product: ArizonansForResponsibleDrugPolicy.org #NoOn205