Make Marijuana Legal

There are many controversial questions constantly being directed towards the issue of legalization of marijuana in America. They vary among informative and argumentative, and require good, strong, supportive facts from multiple sources to answer. Any argument is futile without credible research for support. Wikipedia.org is usually never one of the sources that I use due to rumors of false information frequently being added to its contents. So where should one hunt for research? I have obtained quite a few sources from news articles and scholarly work to answer the following: why marijuana is illegal to begin with, what the positive and negative effects are from using it, and why marijuana is still illegal despite conclusive evidence that it is less of a threat to society than more commonly used substances such as alcohol and cigarettes. Overall, I found conclusive evidence proving why marijuana is, in fact, a harmless recreational drug and should be legalized.


TIME magazine provides a brief but excellent article discussing the historical use and growth of marijuana. This recreational drug was used for healing purposes in China from over 5,000 years ago, and remained as a beneficiary until the Harrison Act was passed in 1914 when drug use was considered a crime. This act created a tax on opium and coca derived drugs that were expensive. People began using marijuana as a backup drug, and Mexican immigrants started to bring it with them across the border to America. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 resulted from this. Nonmedical use of marijuana in America became officially illegal, and has remained that way ever since. But is it really that bad for you?


“Marijuana’s effect on the brain is far from understood,” is stated in an article from the U.S. News and World Report. With all of the studies done on the physical, mental, short and long term effects of marijuana, it is hard to agree with the illegalization laws. Studies have apparently shown marijuana to lead to cases of depression and schizophrenia. But then why is medical marijuana used to treat cases of depression or cancer? Also, how is that study verifiable when the National Institute of Mental Health states schizophrenia affects one percent of Americans, a small percentage more than the amount of heavy marijuana users in the country? Scientists believe schizophrenia is mainly caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors. The majority of that one percent, therefore, would not receive the disease solely from marijuana use. Further evidence stresses how there are literally eight different variables needed to be taken into consideration during marijuana use for each and every individual. How is it possible to correlate these studies on an extremely small amount of people to the entire population of America when everyone is uniquely different?


These are just a few examples of how shaky the credibility of the illegalization of marijuana is. Marijuana is, in fact, not nearly as harmful as any other addicting substance when abused. Alcohol consumption is the cause of over 100,000 American deaths each year, and cigarette smoking alone results in approximately thirty percent of all cancer deaths (eighty seven percent for lung cancer). Yes, marijuana has the same respiratory problems as cigarettes, but think of how many cigarettes people smoke daily compared to the occasional joint or two smoked by marijuana users a day. Then the research of how marijuana smoke is twice as harmful as cigarette smoke comes into play. But that just goes back to credible research, and will be discussed in further detail when the final draft of the essay is presented. What is important to note here is that in order to die from marijuana overdose, you would need to smoke forty thousand times more THC than your body can take, while you only need four to ten times more in the case of alcohol consumption. Which one is illegal again?


Marijuana is still considered illegal today due to its false label as a harmful drug and not its true definition as a recreational drug. It is a shame because the United States government has spent over $500 billion on the War On Drugs without much improvement. There is no evidence on what will happen if marijuana became legal, only assumptions. This makes it hard to justify arguments to legalize marijuana. The government does not intend to give up their fight against the mainly assumed “gateway drug.” This leads me to the Wikipedia.org experiment as mentioned in the beginning of this essay.

I decided my erroneous information would be a short paragraph stating a sudden decision by President Bush to legalize nonmedical marijuana. President Bush read this essay and agreed wholeheartedly that America made a wrong decision. Marijuana is legal; just like that. I did not feel guilty at all while writing this because I personally try to avoid Wikipedia for research anyway. After ten minutes with my false information still evident, I became excited. I assume lots of people add false information to anything they can possibly think of for amusement. It only takes a little extra effort to skip past the Wikipedia link and look into the plethora of other links and databases with your desired information. They are a lot more credible than Wikipedia because of their lack of possible falsification of information, and some even have a more interesting layout to look forward to than that plain white background!