Reefer Madness!

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Some issues are less about right and wrong and more about sense and nonsense. In a nation where both cigarettes and alcohol are perfectly legal, it simply makes no sense for cannabis to be outlawed. The issue of legalization is not a moral one in my view. Legalizing marijuana isn't morally right, it's rationally sound. Marijuana's effects are no more devastating than that of alcohol or cigarettes, the fear of marijuana generated by multiple sources in the last century are outdated and motivated by financial gain, and the current number of men imprisoned due to drug possession has massively crippling effects on the economy.

Ganja is not good for you. Some argue that it possesses properties that combat cancer, but this has not been proven. However, marijuana is by no stretch of the imagination worse than cigarettes or alcohol. The adverse effects of alcohol and tobacco have been documented extensively. Alcohol damages the liver, is calorie-laden, and yet perfectly legal for anyone above the age of twenty one. Cigarettes have been so closely tied to lung cancer that they require a warning to be printed on the side of the box. Marijuana can also have a slew of negative outcomes, but many would agree that they are relatively minor. Furthermore, many consider marijuana a “gate-way drug”. It is my belief that many move into a more dangerous territory (That of hard drugs) when they see that marijuana isn't all that bad and begin to believe that the government is simply lying to them for their own gains, and that is marijuana isn't as bad as it was cracked up to be, so to must be the case for harder drugs. I am not an advocate for any other illegal substance.

The amount of people currently incarcerated due to drug possession in the United States is startling. We have more prisoners than China despite having a population roughly a third as large. If that isn't a comment on the problem with the system, I don't know what is. Having so many people as wards of the state is economically unfeasible, and our current economic track says as much. I do not pretend that legalization will solve our problems as a nation, but it would at least let us relax as everything turns to dung.