Legalization is not just about smoking. If someone wants to smoke marijuana, and they’re not harming anybody else, then that is their own choice and they don’t deserve to be criminalized.

   The reality is, whether these substances are legal or not, people are going to continue to use them. Making them illegal is only putting the distribution of marijuana in the hands of unorganized criminals. Prohibition fills our jails with nonviolent people, which tears apart families, which causes a lot more harm than good. The weed isn’t killing anybody, the war on it is.

    The US spends $300 billion a decade on the war on drugs, more than what is spent ending world hunger. Studies show that it’s much easier for teens to readily access marijuana than alcohol.

Abdicating the production and distribution of weed to the black market provides children with greater access to it because it leaves the decision of what an appropriate age is up to the drug dealer. If they are already committing a crime, they will likely have no problem selling it to kids. Every time a drug dealer is throw in jail, there are still ten more around the corner.

   Marijuana also provides a variety of safe medicinal purposes such as treatment for cancer, insomnia, nausea, pain, depression, loss of appetite, Crohn’s disease, seizure disorders, muscle spasms, HIV, and many other conditions all with no serious side effects.

     “But people who smoke weed are lazy,”  some say. If that were always true, how are some people who smoke three or four times a day still going to school and getting straight A’s or keeping a stable job? If people being lazy is enough reason to criminalize cannabis, mayge we should throw people who watch TV in jail while we’re at it.

    Not only is marijuana useful for medical purposes, but it’s also completely harmless in comparison to alcohol and tobacco, both of which are completely legal. 443,000 people die year round from smoking tobacco while another 8.6 million live with a serious disease. 75,000 die yearly from alcohol abuse and nearly 15,000 from prescription painkiller overdoses. Even caffeine is estimated to cause 5,000 deaths per year. So where does marijuana stand?

    Studies conducted over 30 years ago that claimed the link to marijuana to the loss of brain cells were incredibly inaccurate. Their experiment forced excessive amounts of pot smoke were forced into the lungs of monkeys without oxygen in between. It was the asphyxiation that killed their brain cells, not the marijuana. So how much harm is it actually doing to the human brain?

  Contrary to popular belief, marijuana is not addictive. When deprived of marijuana, the body does not go through withdrawals, which means you can quit whenever you want. And for those who say marijuana is a “gateway drug”, it’s not the cannabis that’s the gateway, but the prohibition of it.

   When you break the law and visit an unethical market to consume cannabis, you have greater access to other drugs. You may visit a drug dealer who will try to offer something stronger. When you get access to cannabis and discover that it isn’t that dangerous, you feel decieved, and won’t believe the mostly factual information about hard drugs.

   So why is marijuana illegal? The government doesn’t actually believe their own propaganda. Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971 not because he was worried about the “health risks”, but because he didn’t want people thinking.

    The pot smokers, or the hippies, were the ones protesting the Vietnam war. Nixon thought that if a whole group of people were criminalized, he wouldn’t have people protesting the war. Marijuana has the power to break down belief systems, which makes people question things like the war and women’s rights. The country couldn’t have that.

   The government doesn’t want people to question the system; they want obedient members of society

   The pharmaceutical industry, the most profitable industry in the world, would never let marijuana take their place. Since cannabis is natural, it cannot be patented, so no profit can be made from it. The industry is greedy, and get their way, of course.

   Marijuana remains classified as a Schedule 1 drug (drug with no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse).

   The good news is that such an opinionated lie can only be told for so long.