Legal Marijuana example essay topic

805 words
We all hear about freedom of choice right! Freedom of choice applies to all decisions made by that person! Which includes the choice to smoke marijuana. I believe that the government should have No say in what you choose to do with your body! Marijuana is now illegal but I believe that it should be made Legal! And under No circumstances should the government tell you how to treat your body.

They can give you their opinions on how the human body should be treated but I think that the government cannot control your decisions. It's all opinionated! People were given these unalienable rights when the U.S. Constitution was established! And under No circumstance should they be changed! Smoking marijuana is not more harmful than drinking or smoking cigarettes. Smoked marijuana contains about the same amount of carcinogens as does an equivalent amount of tobacco.

It should be remembered, however, that a heavy tobacco smoker consumes much more tobacco than a heavy marijuana smoker consumes marijuana. This is because smoked tobacco, with a 90% addiction rate, is the most addictive of all drugs while marijuana is less addictive than caffeine. Two other factors are important. The first is that paraphernalia laws directed against marijuana users make it difficult to smoke safely.

These laws make water pipes and bongs, which filter some of the carcinogens out of the smoke, illegal and, hence, unavailable. The second is that, if marijuana were legal, it would be more economical to have cannabis drinks like tea which are totally non-carcinogenic. This is in stark contrast with 'smokeless' tobacco products like snuff which can cause cancer of the mouth and throat. When all of these facts are taken together, it can be clearly seen that the reverse is true: marijuana is much SAFER than tobacco.

Smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products actually damage your body more yet they are not illegal. The government sells these products to actually make money. Marijuana is mostly grown, like tobacco. So even if it was made legal the government could make profit off of the selling.

Every day at least one person overdoses on drugs even if they are prescribed. Have you ever heard of anyone over dosing on marijuana? Animal tests have revealed that extremely high doses of cannabinoids are needed to have lethal effect. This has led scientists to conclude that the ratio of the amount of cannabinoids necessary to get a person intoxicated (i. e., stoned) relative to the amount necessary to kill them is 1 to 40,000. In other words, to overdose, you would have to consume 40,000 times as much marijuana as you needed to get stoned. In contrast, the ratio for alcohol varies between 1 to 4 and 1 to 10.

It is easy to see how upwards of 5000 people die from alcohol overdoses every year and no one EVER dies of marijuana overdoses. People also say that people who are high would be driving on our roads and end up getting in many car accidents and killing other people. According to the I CLU drug task force marijuana, when used for intoxication, does impair performance in a manner similar to alcohol, actual studies of the effect of marijuana on the automobile accident rate suggest that it poses less of a hazard than alcohol. When a random sample of fatal accident victims was studied, it was initially found that marijuana was associated with relatively as many accidents as alcohol. In other words, the number of accident victims intoxicated on marijuana relative to the number of marijuana users in society gave a ratio similar to that for accident victims intoxicated on alcohol relative to the total number of alcohol users.

However, a closer examination of the victims revealed that around 85% of the people intoxicated on marijuana were also intoxicated on alcohol. For people only intoxicated on marijuana, the rate was much lower than for alcohol alone. This finding has been supported by other research using completely different methods. For example, an economic analysis of the effects of decriminalization on marijuana usage found that states that had reduced penalties for marijuana possession experienced a rise in marijuana use and a decline in alcohol use with the result that fatal highway accidents decreased.

This would suggest that, far from causing 'carnage', legal marijuana might actually save lives. The point of this matter is, marijuana is legal in many other countries in europe and the netherlands and they hardly have the drug problems we have today in the US. Marijuana should be legalized and should be freedom a of choice.