Pros And Cons Of Marijuana Decriminalization

The war on drugs in America began with the Nixon administration as an effort to target racial minorities. Laws were passed so that police could carry out especially brutal enforcement tactics under the protection of the law. This sort of legal action is comparable to the 1887 Separate but Equal law, describing equal accommodations for both white and black men, but physically segregated. Americas war on drugs violates human ethics in the same way, that it allows government officials to treat people differently based on race. The law claims it's for the protection against the potential dangers of select narcotics, but these laws were historically (and still are) enforced with more brutality, legal and physical, in concentrated areas of people

To research this, I went to Pro Quest and chose to do an advanced search. I used the search terms "marijuana," "cannabis," "society," and "decriminalization." I didn't put any other limitations on my advanced search, although when the results appeared, there was a small box on the left side that offered to narrow my search even further. It offered to see only articles from scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, etc. I felt like choosing a scholarly journal would offer more reliable information, which narrowed my search results from 124 to

Although it is a little discrediting, its important to note that almost every article I interpreted as pro-cannabis. There were a few thrown in here or there, but the evidence to support them was insufficient and irrelevant compared to the mountains of information regarding amazing possibilities for the future of marijuana. I did stumble upon an article that I found valuable because it offered a perspective from a legal standpoint. After scrolling through a random amount of articles, one of them caught my eye. It read: "Current Medical and Legal Status for Smoked "Medical Marijuana" and Addiction. The FDA does have one genuine reason to keep marijuana Schedule one, and that reason is the smoke factor. Many of the experiments that are credible were only done using oral doses. Inhaling heated plant matter is bad for your lungs and can actually cause cancer. That being said, cigarettes are still FDA approved and the main source of dosing is via smoke. So I understand why smoking marijuana cant be approved for medical use, but the argument for the dangers of smoking obviously didn't come out negative enough to criminalize