The Pros And Cons Of Legalizing Marijuana

Marijuana has been the center of the drug circle for years now. The federal government has made this drug illegal merely on the fact that it isn’t a taxed good. To frightening people into not smoking marijuana, the government puts out fear campaigns to steer people in the other direction. When you look at the actually pros and cons of legalizing marijuana, the pros out lift the cons. The drug can be used for medical use, like to stabilize diseases, or to relieve pain. Just like alcohol, marijuana can be just for recreational use. Even though it is in the underground market currently, marijuana has done less destruction than alcohol and tobacco all together.

Voters in several states and cities went to the polls Tuesday to contemplate legalizing

The research that these doctors take are not results they produced themselves. Instead, it is just words and numbers thrown out there by the government. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, says he was incorrect about marijuana's medical prospective when he wrote a paper in 2009 called "Why I would Vote No on Pot." Gupta made a movie where he acknowledged that the research for the movie changed his thoughts about marijuana and its effects. Gupta met with several medical experts and medical marijuana patients while traveling the world for research. Gupta said "we have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that" (CNN). Marijuana laws are not constructed on science. Gupta wrote: "Not because of sound science, but because of its absence, marijuana was classified as a schedule 1 substance”

There is no real dependency on marijuana after usage. Cocaine, classified as a schedule 2 substance, makes 20% of its users to become addicted (CNN). Around 25% of heroin users and 30% of tobacco users become addicted (CNN). In some cases, marijuana is the only thing that works for certain people. There is one woman in Colorado who used marijuana to cut the number of seizures she had from 300-per-week to two or three per month. In this case, marijuana was the only drug that helped this woman with her condition. This is contrary to the belief that marijuana causes an increase in seizures. Marijuana is safer than a lot of prescription drugs out there. A person dies from a prescription drug overdose every 19 minutes in the United States, but Sanjay Gupta could not find a single person who died from a marijuana overdose (CNN). Giving up marijuana can produce some withdrawal symptoms, like insomnia, anxiety and nausea, but it