Marijuana On Cancer Patients example essay topic

Marijuana Legalization We live in the land of the free, free to say what we want, to buy what we want, and to do what we want. One can get drunk, smoke a cigarette, and shoot a gun all at the same time with no worry of being punished (unless of course any of these actions harms someone else). These things are all dangerous, and yet all legal. However, if one was to grow a plant (marijuana) in his or her backyard and smoke whatever that plant yielded, they could be arrested.

Who is the government to tell me that a naturally occurring, organic plant is illegal to smoke, eat, or grow? Marijuana or hemp cultivation has been practiced for thousands of years by hundreds of civilizations. Our own government in its early day's used hemp for making rope, baskets, and paper. Today the government considers marijuana a narcotic and even considers medicinal use illegal. In 1937, the federal government passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which made nonmedical use of marijuana illegal. Only the birdseed industry, which argued that hemp seeds gave birds' feathers a particularly shiny gloss, was exempted from the act, and to this day birdseed producers are allowed to use imported hemp seeds treated so they don't sprout.

With an exception during World War II, when the government planted huge hemp crops to supply naval rope needs and make up for Asian hemp supplies controlled by the Japanese, marijuana was criminalized and harsher penalties were applied. In the 1950's Congress passed the Boggs Act and the Narcotics Control Act, which laid down mandatory sentences for drug offenders, including marijuana possessors and distributors. Despite an easing of marijuana laws in the 1970's, the Reagan Administration's get-tough drug policies applied to marijuana as well. Still, the long-term trend has been toward relaxation: Today, twelve states have enacted some form of marijuana decriminalization.

Complete legalization of marijuana could potentially bring a lot of tax dollars into government hands. The amount of money spent on marijuana consumption in this country exceeds $10 billion, so why shouldn't the government be getting a piece of that? That money could be spent fixing up our run down public schools or helping underprivelaged kids get a chance at college. The government knows how bad tobacco is and yet it stays legal because of the ludicrous amount of tax money it generates.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms statistics for the fiscal year of 2001 showed that Government revenue from tobacco exceeded $5.2 billion. Marijuana, as far as the government knows, is no worse for you than tobacco so why not legalize it and watch the money roll in. If marijuana was legalized, just a 5% government tax could generate over $500 million in tax dollars (based on statistic that $10 bil was spent on pot in the U.S. last year). Also if it was legal that means it could be regulated, much like tobacco and alcohol is now, so that it stays out of the hands of minors. Many prominent law enforcement officials also back the idea of legalizing marijuana. Just recently the Nevada Conference of Police and Sheriff's announced that it's board members unanimously supported the pro-pot initiative (Question 9; which was for legalizing pot for recreational use, which was defeated at the polls in November) so they could focus on more serious crimes.

According to a 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of Federal and state prisoners approximately 19% of Federal and 13% of state drug offenders were incarcerated for a marijuana-related offense. There were a total of 1,586,902 arrests for drug abuse violations in the United States during 2001. Of the arrests 5.2% were for marijuana sales or manufacturing and 40.4% were for possession of marijuana. With these statistics, it's no wonder that many in law enforcement want the drug legalized in order to clear up some of our crowded prisons and focus on more serious crimes. While state's keep becoming more and more lenient towards marijuana due to victorious initiatives and propositions, the federal government seems to be getting more and more strict.

Just this past August the federal government started busting medical marijuana organizations under federal law, even though what they were doing was legal under state law. This kind of federal bullying has many concerned in California, including attorney general Bill Lockyer and Governor Gray Davis who both expressed concern over the fed's bust. After all, isn't a big reason why we have our state systems of government is because we want people in a given state to determine for themselves what is legal or illegal, rather than some powerful regime in Washington? The federal government claims there is very little proof that marijuana has any medicinal purposes, but at the same time they are conducting almost no studies. Right now, the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of San Francisco is the only U.S. government backed institution conducting research on medicinal marijuana. In fact, marijuana remains the only drug that researchers must acquire directly from the feds, in other words, they need both FDA and DEA approval.

I think marijuana should be legal, period. But to deny a dying cancer, glaucoma, or AIDS patient a drug that they say helps them with nausea or pain is just plain wrong. Recently at the University of San Francisco, Dr. Donald Abrams conducted experiments on HIV patients that showed test subjects who smoked marijuana gained an average of 6.6 lbs during the trial, compared with 2.4 lbs for the group taking the placebo. Dr. Abrams also found that short-term cannabis use doesn't substantially raise viral loads of HIV patients, in fact, his study participants who smoked pot enjoyed significantly higher increases in their lymphocytes (cells that help fight disease) than those who took a placebo. The same is true for cancer patients. Among the efforts to study marijuana on cancer patients is a preliminary study conducted in New York state on 56 cancer patients who were unresponsive to conventional anti emetic agents.

The patients were asked to rate the effectiveness of marijuana compared with results during prior chemotherapy cycles. In this survey, 34% of patients rated marijuana as moderately or highly effective. For those suffering from Glaucoma, marijuana is proven to reduce intraocular eye pressure by 25%. This lessens the pain on the eyeballs and makes living with the disease much more tolerable. Marijuana does have medicinal qualities, however most use it recreation ally as a sedative similar to alcohol. Its effects are no more severe than being drunk, and yet it is illegal.

According to the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse it was used by 76 percent of current illicit drug users. An estimated 37% of Americans aged 12 or older had used marijuana or hashish in their lifetime, 9.3% reported using it in the last year, and 5.4% (12,122,000) of Americans 12 or older were current users of marijuana in 2000. People like to label marijuana as the "gateway drug" because it leads to other things. However I think this is an unfair assumption because I know people who have only smoked marijuana and it doesn't lead to anything else and I have known people who completely skipped marijuana and went straight to harder drugs. The same logic used to say marijuana is a gateway drug can be used to say that alcohol is a gateway drug. "He does crack now but it all started with marijuana".

Yeah right, and before marijuana he was getting drunk off Dad's liquor cabinet. How many of us smoked marijuana before we drank alcohol? Not many I bet. There is not much information on the long term side effects of marijuana, but if it was legal experiments and tests could be done to determine the lasting effects. As of now, our best evidence of side effects caused from long term marijuana smoking is that it does hurt your short term memory, however there is no evidence to say it makes you dumber or less intelligent.

It also does increase your risk of getting cancer but the risk increase for someone who smokes pot is about the same for someone who smokes cigarettes. Also, when someone is actually smoking marijuana it causes an increase in heart rate by 4 x the normal resting rate, however statistically that means smoking pot is about as dangerous for a fit person as exercise. Everybody is so quick to label marijuana as a narcotic which automatically makes it wrong and illegal. I think we should be looking at all the possible benefits of marijuana not only socially and medically, but also economically.

Bibliography

1) Stein, Joel. Cloud, John. Time Magazine. "The New Politics of Pot" 4 November, 2002 2) Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
2001 Statistical Release".
web 3) Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Marijuana Facts". December, 2002.
web 4) Joy, Janet. Benson Jr., John. Watson, Stanley. National Institute of Medicine. "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base". February, 2002.