Arguments for the Legalization of Marijuana
The debate for the legalization of marijuana hits all aspects from political and economic to societal and medical perspectives. Marijuana has been used for centuries but it’s been riding a political roller coaster with each passing presidential administration and medical advancement since the start of the 20th century. Each medical study that finds a link between chronic users and mental illness seems to have a counterbalance, like marijuana’s benefits for cancer patients suffering through chemo treatments. As of now, cannabis is in a kind of legal gray area, with conflicting federal and state laws. Nevertheless, marijuana is more accepted now than ever before, and not just from my millennial, soCal perspective. It’s a trend that won’t stop any time soon, but neither will its challengers.
Like any smart advocate, marijuana supporters rave about the medical advantages, economic growth, and decrease in crime that legalization would bring. However, they often fail to mention the risks to your lungs and mind as well as the societal consequences of increased accessibility. Meanwhile, critics spew the same arguments vice versa. A common comparison drawn is that of marijuana to alcohol. According to the Center for Disease Control, excessive alcohol is responsible for 88,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, not to mention the ripple effect each death has on others. On the other hand, in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that there has been minuscule 3% increase of traffic accidents. Another finding that backs this up was a in study published by the American Journal for Public Health that found zero increase of fatal traffic accidents involving people driving high on marijuana. So why are such small, insignificant statistics matched with such extreme laws and regulations? While alcohol remains legal even though alcohol-impaired driving contributes 29% of traffic-related deaths, marijuana remains on the DEA’s list of Schedule I drugs, right beside heroin and LSD.
President Nixon and his administration are responsible for marijuana’s placement on the list of Schedule I drugs which are classified as, “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” To further complicate his decision to harshly criminalize weed among other drugs, it must be known that it wasn't intended to be a “War on Drugs” at all. To start a race war, he created a drug war. After spending time in a federal prison and public shaming, John Ehrlichman, who served as the domestic policy chief to President Nixon had little left to lose. He revealed, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Nixon’s intentions aside, the legal history of marijuana is complicated and highly controversial.
Marijuana has been used as herbal medicine for about 2500 years with its origins planted firmly in Asia. Until the 20th century, marijuana experienced little to no legal obstacles since it was mainly used medicinally. It was even sold in pharmacies. But at the start of the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants introduced recreational marijuana amidst the widespread unemployment in the United States. Closely following its introduction to American culture, the Prohibition era put a nearly immediate end to the use and acceptance of marijuana. Within just a few years, the Marijuana Tax Act was signed which criminalized weed across the country, with the exception of highly-regulated, industrial use. The hype and hate around weed reached the public eye and opinion with the counterculture movement and with the presidential administrations of Nixon and Reagan. The criminalization of weed saw a steady increase until California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana with the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 and since then, the stigma of weed as a dangerous drug has been slowly dismantled.
Many marijuana advocates like to compare weed to alcohol, like apples to oranges. They like to point out the differences between a weekend-long smoking binge versus a weekend-long drinking binge. One has a tendency to kill a lot more than the other. The weekend of heavy drinking carries countless more risks which are strongly backed by frightening, rock-solid statistics. In an article in The Federalist, Joseph Turner explains why alcohol is so widely accepted as opposed to marijuana, despite its alarming numbers. He reasons that it’s a part of our western culture. “Since time immemorial, liquors and wines and ales have been used to melt tensions and build bonds, mark celebrations and consecrate rituals. Dangerous or not, it is a part of our heritage.” Alcohol has held a distinguished place in our history. When drinking ever so contaminated water from rivers that doubled as sewers was just as dangerous as playing Russian roulette, wine or ale was the go-to.
Turner then takes the much more substantial risks of alcohol out of the picture and focus solely on the risks of marijuana use. Studies have repeatedly linked cannabis use to several mental illnesses, some more serious than others. Some of the more serious, like schizophrenia, and some of the arguably less serious like lowered IQ, impaired short-term and long-term memory, anxiety, and depression have been linked. These numerous studies simply linking smoking pot to developing a type of mental illness remain, for the most part, inconclusive, which actually emphasizes his point. It’s simply too early to tell how marijuana use, with its huge, ever-developing range of uses will affect people down the line. He wants us to consider how a lifetime of use and generations of lifetime use will affect our humanity as a whole. Also, the largest group of marijuana users and supporters are those most as risk. Teens and young adults are at the highest potential risk since our brains aren't fully developed until the age of twenty-five. Cranial scans of long-standing users revealed notable changes to their brain structures. Whether or not those changes in brain structure are necessarily unhealthy or dangerous, they are concerning. With so little research, it’s hard to tell. Even though the decades on top of decades of research may seem like a lot to those who support legalization, it’s not enough to thoroughly examine the really long-term effects of the proven mind-altering substance.
All the unknowns of long-term use can seem like a black hole. It could be opening pandora’s box or it could be a rainbow leading to a pot of gold. Turner’s article then circles away from the unknown, and into the well-known short-term effects of marijuana. For instance, a lack of motivation, increase in appetite, and overall nonchalant attitude are all characteristics that may seem harmless but, in excess, may culminate in a larger number of school dropouts, less college applicants, and less high-powered career hunters. Turner writes that, “Marijuana has both acute and residual effects, and these become the normal state for habitual users—“permastoned,” as the smokers say. They may be basically functional, but experience constant low energy, faint anxiety, and dulled minds that impair their ability to operate in the world.” If people are stuck sitting on a couch drooling over a bong, how will this country keep running? What will America look like in ten, fifty, or even a hundred years if its people refuse to put down the pipe? “We probably won’t see crime waves, spikes in traffic accidents, or junkies roaming the streets, as some have speculated, because that’s not what pot does. Rather, we can expect the results of a collective decrease in motivation and ambition,” Joseph Turner asserts. With this, he brings up that even if with the certain risks to your health aside, marijuana definitely poses risks to your potential and to America’s potential.
Probably one of the largest arguments against legalization is the theory of marijuana acting as a gateway drug. It insists that smoking weed will lead to people desiring something more, something harder. This is based on the fact that many junkies report using marijuana before proceeding to cocaine, methamphetamine, or heroin, etc. In a Newsweek article, Miriam Boeri shuts down this theory. With research to back her up, she tells that most pot smokers don't go on to use harder, more dangerous drugs. Most people put down the bong when their families and careers become more important. In other words, they simply grow out of it. Also based on a study run by the International Journal for Equity in Health, she lists the major factors that are likely to lead to hard drug use. Marijuana is nowhere among them. The real “gateways” are actually poverty or a poor social environment like one involving gang violence or domestic abuse, close association with others involved with hard drugs, living in areas with tougher law enforcement, as well as suffering from a mental illness or a type of antisocial personality disorder. She argues that researchers attempting to prove the gateway theory have no trouble finding a correlation between using marijuana and using hard drugs. But correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The results of many studies and surveys on marijuana are at an inconclusive standstill. Researchers are struggling to draw a direct line because there are so many different factors to be considered. They must take into account how much the drug is used, the age at which they begin to do the drug, as well as a person’s genetic vulnerability.
Boeri then brings up an article published in The Atlantic by a Harvard lecturer named, Nathan Greenslit. She summarized how, “U.S. drug policy began with racist fear-mongering by Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry Anslinger in 1937.” She then hits on how marijuana’s Schedule I status is not based on the drug at all. Nixon’s administration created the Drug Enforcement Agency as a part of his big “war on drugs” and situated it as a Schedule I drug, despite the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse advising against it. Notice how in the very title of the commission, ‘marijuana’ and ‘drug’ are two separate things. Its placement on the list of Schedule I drugs severely impedes vital research. Researchers have to go through a lengthy process to get approval from multiple federal departments just to conduct a heavily regulated and restrictive study, especially if they intend to disprove the gateway theory. Boeri explains, “For decades, scientists who study addiction have received millions of dollars in government and pharmaceutical funding to perpetuate the gateway hypothesis. Many would lose their respected reputations (or continued funding) if a gateway mechanism is not a legitimate research goal.” Boeri claims that the gateway theory as well as marijuana’s Schedule I status are merely scare tactics with a racist agenda.
To conclude, she writes how marijuana could be a gateway, that is, a gateway out of hard drugs. Her findings draw to a close with the fact that marijuana use is extremely helpful to opiate addicts undergoing withdrawal symptoms in the recovery process. States which have legalized marijuana have not seen an increase in crime and at the same time, they have seen a decrease in opiate overdose deaths. Boeri finishes by saying, “It’s time to move beyond marijuana as a gateway drug and start to study its use as treatment for the deadly, addictive and socially devastating drugs.”
Genetics must be taken into account as a risk factor when trying to grasp the concept of marijuana potentially leading to hard drug abuse or psychosis later on in life. In an study designed by a team of scholars in the Society of Biological Psychiatry, which focused on the concern of genetic vulnerability with marijuana use, it was found that a single mutation of a gene greatly increases the likelihood of someone developing psychosis after using marijuana. The gene is called AKT1. This gene works as a signaler for dopamine in a portion of the brain called the striatum and when the striatum is stimulated by certain genes, like the AKT1 gene, it floods with dopamine. The well known fact that abnormal signaling of dopamine is associated with schizophrenia prompts researchers to pin down all possible risk factors.
Their study discovered that the chances of a person with the AKT1 gene mutation has of developing psychosis during their adult years can be greatly influenced by marijuana use during adolescence. The study’s results state that, “Among subjects who had never used cannabis, there was again no significant association between genotype and presence of a psychotic disorder. In contrast, among both occasional and daily cannabis users, the C/C carriers indicated an increase in the probability of suffering a psychotic disorder in comparison with those with the T/T genotype, but only among daily cannabis users did the increased odds of psychosis shown by C/C carriers reach significance.” In other words, this study establishes that marijuana use does in fact, increase your risk for developing a psychiatric disorder if you carry an AKT1 genotype. To be more specific, the study found that an AKT1 gene carrier and chronic user’s risk for developing a severe mental disorder increases by 700%, compared with people who use little to no marijuana.
So while this study leaves no room for doubt about the link between marijuana in people who carry the AKT1 genotype and serious psychiatric disorders, they discuss some real world application. Very few people who smoke pot will actually develop a mental illness like schizophrenia. In fact, the AKT1 gene mutation is very rare but it’s vital to point out because of the massive, widespread growth of marijuana use in recent years. In truth, not too many people are aware of which exact gene mutations they carry. If people knew they had that genotype, would they still light up, despite the sevenfold risk of suffering from a mental illness later in life? The authors concluded in their discussion by saying, “Identifying such gene variants and the biological pathways they influence can improve our understanding on how they exert their effect on an individual's liability to psychosis in the presence of particular environmental risk factors.” The essential knowledge uncovered in this study can put in place health programs to help those at risk and to spread awareness. After all, knowledge is power.
Probably one of the largest benefits of the legalization of marijuana would be its economic impact. In an article written by Krishna Mrinalini, she outlines the positive economic effects of legalizing the drug on a state level would bring and how they may be what’s driving states to take steps to legalize. Even if lawmakers don't necessarily like marijuana and its characteristics, they see dollar signs. Just in 2015, Colorado raked in more than $135 million is tax revenues just from sales of medical and recreational marijuana. That was the result of more than $996 million of total sales in the state. That is almost a trillion dollars flowing through the economy and contributing vast growth in Colorado. The tax revenue states could collect on cannabis carry enormous capability. It is revenue that could go towards helping people in need or repairing vital infrastructure. However spent, more tax dollars means safer and cleaner streets. With the seemingly successful example of Colorado paving the way for California, it has been estimated that California could exceed $3 billion in tax revenue.
In addition to the incalculable significance legalization would directly have on the state economies, and perhaps eventually the nation’s economy, is the tremendous impact on the job market. Mrinalini proposes that, “Setting up marijuana nurseries and dispensaries would be the first step for the states that voted in favor of medical marijuana. These would not only create jobs but also set the ball rolling for economic activity in the pot industry in these areas.” It’s much easier to figure the sheer scale of the influence legalization would have for states with the infrastructure for such business already in place, like California or Nevada. An IFC study took a look at the numbers and estimated that at least 81,000 jobs have been created in California due to the steep climb in legal marijuana sales. These numbers are expected only to rise over time.
Amidst the enormous opportunity at hand, marijuana is still in a legal gray area with its state laws contradicting its federal laws. Mrinalini concludes by drawing the bottom line, “Though the industry certainly has some good projections, those might soon dampen if Jeff Session rescinds the Cole Memo, which guides prosecutors on how to prioritize marijuana laws.” The marijuana industry does indeed carry huge potential, but it’s fragile. Jeff Sessions holds it in his hands.
Following the previous article about the economic advantages that legalization has, here are some disadvantages. In an article, German Lopez, while not failing to mention the upsides, points out that the massive growth of legal marijuana has downsides. With more and more obstacles being knocked down, marijuana is more profitable and easier to cultivate than ever before. This rapid growth translates to lower prices of the product which may seem like a good thing, at least to stoners. However, lower prices mean less tax revenue. Colorado was the first state to legalize recreational marijuana and is an ongoing experiment. According to the Colorado Department of Revenue, the wholesale price of cannabis has dropped significantly. It has plunged about 22% since the state broke new ground and legalized recreational use in 2014.
Another substantial effect this price drop will bring is increased accessibility. The more affordable, the more accessible it is, and the more accessible it is for adults and parents especially, the more accessible it is for children. There is no doubt that more children will take a bite of a pot brownie or a THC-laced gummy by accident, possibly resulting in an expensive emergency room visit or a terrifying phone call with Poison Control. German Lopez then goes on to emphasize the effect marijuana will have, not only the actual drug, but the acceptance and its easy attainability. We simply don't know how this is going to affect our children and our children’s children down the line.
The legalization of marijuana wouldn’t be the definitive end to mass incarceration nor would it be the end of the black market, but it would weaken them, no question. Bouncing off the above articles, another article written by Mark Mauer stresses that lower prices brought on by legalization would keep a huge chunk of change out of the hands of drug cartels. The more affordable legal marijuana becomes, the less likely people are to buy it from the black market and support shady, unregulated, and criminal business.
Mark Mauer, in his article he published at the perfectly suiting time of 4:20pm, describes that its place among other Schedule I drugs has been an extremely unproductive use of valuable time and resources. Of the 1.5 million drug-related arrests that take place every year in America, only about 40,000 people actually end up getting incarcerated for a marijuana crime. With so few cannabis-related arrests leading to incarceration, there is an obvious and monstrous waste of the justice system going on. The time police and justice officials take to make arrests, appear in court, and coordinate probation and parole terms could be much better spent by locking up violent offenders with the potential to do far worse things than circle around a bong and munch on food. Mauer ends on an optimistic note and writes that, “National drug policy is shifting toward a greater emphasis on treatment approaches to substance abuse, and thoughtful leaders in law enforcement are serving as models for how to engage communities in collaborative efforts for promoting public safety.”
CONS OF SMOKING (WEED) Marijuana has health risks other than genetic vulnerability and the likelihood of falling into slacker behavior.
MEDICAL BENEFITS PROS
healthy bodies + healthy planet…. biodegradable plastic and textiles from hemp stalk
lobbying against weed is funded by alc companies
biological testing
Based on all this research, I must side with the advocates of legalization. The pros greatly outweigh the few cons I came up with. Most of the pros seem to stand firmly, while the few cons could still be flipped around into pros. For example, the notion of affordability translating to accessibility resulting in kids being likelier to try it is two-sided. Adolescents may raid their parents’ weed stashes just as they do their liquor cabinets but that is only due to the “forbidden fruit” quality that the two substances convey. I believe the true problem is that of exposure. The more commonly it is talked about, the less hype there is around it. Exposure could lead younger generations to see it as a medicinal tool rather than an illicit drug and this could be widely beneficial.
While I realize immediate, universal legalization is wishful thinking, reform at the very least, is all too necessary. Medical marijuana in this country is a joke. While still in high school, a private, Catholic one that enforced random drug testing on all its students, I got my medical marijuana recommendation. I spent no more than fifteen minutes on the internet and no more than $40 of my allowance to receive a questionably-legitimate, doctor’s recommendation. While so lax of a system makes attaining medical cannabis for people who really need it for chronic pain or nausea effortless, it also makes it extremely easy for underage students who might be unfortunate enough to be called in to the dean’s office for a random drug test at their Catholic high school. On one hand I have no problem with just about anyone who wants pot getting pot, but on the other hand, I don't want our system to be a joke.
Following the example of how Portugal decriminalized all drugs and began treating users as patients rather than villains, I don't think that solution will immediately heal our country’s drug problem, especially in regards to the opiate epidemic. I think there needs to be a balance of compassion to law. In some states, if someone is hospitalized for an overdose, they may automatically be handcuffed to the hospital bed and then arrested for possession of a drug simply being in their blood. The war on drugs is not helping and this vicious cycle is just costing us money. Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama passionately stated, “Mass incarceration does not make us safer. Yet for three decades, our country has prioritized spending on prisons instead of classrooms. We can no longer afford this failure to invest in opportunity, only to lock up people once they’ve dropped out of school and turned to crime. These misguided priorities make us less safe and betray our values, and it is time we came together as a country to invest in our people and their capacity to contribute to society.” If the Prohibition taught the U.S. anything, it’s that you can’t legislate what people put in their bodies in their free time. `
As a millennial, the most stressed out age group in America right now, I know people will always be in search of a stress release. Alcohol and weed are among the most common. Binge-drinking kills six people on an average day in America and more people than you’d probably think are classified as an alcoholic. Meanwhile, marijuana carries zero physically addictive qualities and not one marijuana overdose has ever been reported and proven. Not one.