The topic I choose to write about in this week’s assignment would be the debate of recreational marijuana. As a former smoker, and as someone who grew up around lots of different drugs in Las Vegas, it’s sort of an easy topic to debate. The problem here, is that both sides are right and wrong on this topic, and it seems that there are benefits as well as consequences to recreational marijuana. One side argues that it is safe and an opportunity for states to generate more total revenue, while the other side thinks it does nothing but harm the economy and the businesses within them. From my personal experiences both sides are correct, but they leave out information or simply don’t have the “correct” information. I will do what I can to explain …show more content…
There’s nothing negative about this. This was revenue that wasn’t generated before, and now its money coming from the people to the state they’re residing in. I’ll get into why the other side doesn’t agree with the revenue of recreational marijuana later, but for now, that’s money the states didn’t have, and now it can go toward improving state funded programs or whatever the state would want to do with it. Another key point or the “pro” of recreational marijuana would be that it is safer than alcohol or tobacco, which is already legal. While one could argue against alcohol being way more harmful, anything like smoke inhaled into your lungs is not good for you. Now, when we talk about marijuana there’s more ways to ingest it than smoke it, so you can go tit-for-tat against tobacco on that sense. Alcohol, on the other hand, has had far more deaths from irresponsible use than marijuana ever had. Research shows that nearly 88,000 people die from alcohol related accidents annually. If you try to find anything about deaths linked to marijuana accidents, it’s very hard to find any solid information. The best I could find was that within 1997 to 2005 there was roughly 279 marijuana related deaths over an 8-year period. Also, tobacco and alcohol are 2 of the 3 leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States, while marijuana is nowhere to be