The marijuana debate continues.
Is marijuana a harmful or a helpful plant? Is it more or less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco – both legal drugs. !
Read the essay below and the articles on Nicenet and respond with your opinion on the legalization of marijuana. What are the pros and cons of its legalization? Share your opinion with the class and the world!
Persuasive Essay on Legalizing Marijuana
Canada recently made international headlines by legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. I have no problem with this decision. If patients could already get morphine, marijuana is no big deal. However, this decision may lead to the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes, something that I oppose.
Legalizing casual pot encourages people to rely on a drug and instead of relying on themselves. For example, an out of shape person feeling the ill effects of a junk food diet could relieve his ailments with exercise and better diet instead of grass.
Marijuana supporters say that it is a profitable underground industry with a huge tax potential that cannot be shut down. They also state that people should have the right to ingest whatever they want to. By that rationale, we should also legalize cocaine and heroin. It would be naïve to think that we could make a fortune taxing pot. Enforcing the taxed selling of cannabis would be just as challenging as enforcing anti-marijuana laws. Many pot users would grow their own cannabis or buy some tax-free from a friend rather than taxed retail grass.
Legalizing marijuana gives the impression that it is acceptable and beneficial. Lenient laws often lead to mass misuse with limited benefits. The United States has more tolerant laws for gun and weapon ownership than Canada does. The N.R.A. often quote the constitution, “all have the right to bare arms”, when facing critics. Who in their right mind would say that liberal gun laws have benefited the U.S. and Canada should follow their example?
What would a terminally ill person sitting immobile in a hospital bed using marijuana do if they were physically healthy again? Answers might include travel, going back to school or spending more time with friends and family. Basically living each day to the fullest. Cannabis activists are lucky to have their physical health but are not living life to its fullest. They are lobbying the government so they can sit around immobile and smoke pot.
The physical effects of marijuana use are “relatively harmless”, but what are the benefits? Escaping your problems without having to deal with them. Ever wonder why the pothead and stoner are stereotype includes laziness? It’s probably rooted in wanting to experience an altered mood without having to do anything.
This is not a holier than thou essay. Like all people, I have skeletons in my closet. I have had an addiction to getting high that started at a young age and remains to this day. It’s not a drug however; I’ve been getting high on life. Only your imagination and perseverance limit what can get out of your day. Get out! Go biking, spend time with family or friends or volunteer. Whatever gets you naturally high.
CounterPoint (by Ron Barker):
I agree with you that marijuana is far from healthy. Obviously, inhaling any kind of smoke is a health hazard. And, if I’d read your essay a few years ago I probably would have agreed with you. When I was in high school, I had friends who were major pot heads. I myself never cracked under the peer pressure (in high school anyways), so I got to sit back and watch my stoned friends fail out of high school. It seemed obvious to me that anyone who smoked marijuana was doomed to live a failure of a life.
My opinion of that changed slightly, however, when in my first semester of university I had a philosophy professor who used to smoke a joint before every class. Anyway, I did an extensive research paper dealing with marijuana where I studied many statistics from recent years. I noticed that a lot of the negative information about marijuana out there is in fact either made up or highly skewed.
Of course, I understand that it works the other way too. Marijuana activists make up positive information to help strengthen their side of the debate.
One point that I never could understand, however, is why alcohol is legal. If you look at the premises presented by the side that thinks marijuana should stay ILLEGAL, you’ll see that most of them can easily be attributed to alcoholics.
Alcohol causes more health problems than does marijuana. Alcohol causes people to forget their inhibitions and act on impulse; marijuana does the opposite, causing most people to slow down and think about their actions more. And, alcohol causes more deaths than does marijuana – this is a fact which cannot be argued.
So, to get to my point, I am neither for nor against legalizing marijuana. I believe that if marijuana is bad enough to be illegal, alcohol should also be illegal. Likewise, if alcohol is okay, marijuana is okay.
I think the police force should be spending more time investigating serious crimes and forget about busting people for having a joint.
Also, to get back to my friends who failed out of high school. I don’t think it was caused by the marijuana. I think that people of such attitude CHOOSE to be marijuana users, and often because of this their failures are attributed to marijuana. I believe that, these same people, if they could relive their lives without marijuana, would fail in the same way.
