I have nothing wrong with protesting against laws — it’s constitutional, sometimes effective, and a great way to voice dissent. However, I don’t think disagreeing with a law gives you carte blanche to violate that law, especially en masse. And that’s specifically what is going to happen in Raleigh on July 28.

On July 28, the Raleigh Amphitheatre and Festival Site will be hosting “Cauzin’ Vapors…Legalize It 2010 Summer Tour” — that is, a pro-Marijuana legalization music festival, like Woodstock with (maybe) more pot. While the booking was not explicitly done by the state (it was done by the company Live Nation), one can already see the issue with the tour: it pretty much encourages consumption of illegal drugs. Of course, the hilarity of this is that the aforementioned convention center is right across from a Raleigh Police Department. Still, it’s pretty clear the entire city of Raleigh can’t mobilize to babysit a bunch of concert goers — so what’s a city to do?

In my opinion, something needs to be done to plan for issues like this. I’ve honestly never understood how local governments could willingly stand aside and watch the law being flagrantly broken just because of the lack of police force. Be it by fining people or by increasing police force on days when such “tours” go on, the government needs to be willing to uphold the laws to everyone, even if a lot of people are violating the law at the same time. Put simply, there is no (and should be no) “group discount” for crime. I’d much rather see an entire concert shut down than to allow it to continue when illegal actions are being implicitly condoned.

But still, it may be that this “tour” manages to get by without a single joint — which would be the ideal situation, as unlikely as it would be. The best protesters are those who not only are able to articulate their dissent on a subject, but those who are also able to display that they do so not out of selfishness or greed, but rather simply by reason. There are a lot of remarkably interesting arguments out there that promote legalizing marijuana — “we do it anyway” isn’t one of them.