Do laws determine what you believe is ethical and what you are willing to do or do you form your own opinions regardless of what the law says?

Do you form your ethics and actions based on current laws or do you form your own opinions based on reasoning and what you believe to be ethical?

Obviously some laws there is no disputing align with ethics such as it is illegal to murder and clearly unethical, it is illegal to assault someone and is clearly unethical, etc. but some laws are not so straight forward.

For instance fairly recently in Canada they made cannabis legal. It was formerly illegal for many years. The same thing happened in many countries with alcohol years and years ago. This isn’t a debate on whether cannabis or alcohol should or shouldn’t have been made legal, rather an example of a law that was debatable in regards to ethics.

What I noticed was that the change of the law changed many peoples views on it and that surprised me.

Even before cannabis was made legal my spouse and I used it from time to time and of course so did many other cannabis supporting Canadians. There were people in our family, people we worked with and people we met who were absolutely dead set against cannabis use and legalization before it was legalized and would directly talk down about it. Some of these exact same people were the first to line up to buy it when it became legal.

My spouses grandmother who is in her 80’s and has been dead set against it for years even tried edibles once it was made legal. 😂

Some of these people that I’ve discussed it with say that their views on it changed solely because of legalization. In a sense these people are aligning their views on what is ok to do or what is ethical to do based on current laws. Before it was legal for them it was awful and no one should do it; the day is became legalized it’s 100% okay in their books.

This view is strange to me because I feel that even when something is illegal you as an intelligent human still have the ability to research things like cannabis for yourself, find it is not harmful (of course everything has risks but it is no more harmful than other legal things like alcohol and much less harmful than cigarettes) and therefore form your own opinion on it and make your own decision about using it or not using it even prior to the law being changed. If there weren’t people in the world who did this then laws like that would never be changed as no one would be advocating for it to be changed. Most people who advocated for cannabis being made legal were already using it at the time it was illegal.

In all countries there are several laws that can be interpreted as ethical or unethical based on your own personal opinions.

I choose to base my ethics and my actions on my own research and opinions, not what the government deems illegal or legal at the present moment because I feel that some laws are not ethical and have no scientific basis on why that said thing is illegal or frowned upon to begin with.

So do you form your opinions, ethics and actions based on what is currently legal or do you form your opinions, ethics and actions based on your own research and what you find to be right regardless of the current law? Would you do something that is currently illegal if you yourself deem it as ethical and okay or would the law make your decision on what you would and would not do?