A Blunt Reality: The Controversial Issue of Marijuana Legalization

Oscar Wilde once said, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” This is indeed what is required when it comes to the lately controversial issue of legalizing cannabis. Of course, several states have publicly legalized marijuana to the extent of medical use (with the exception of Colorado as it legalized both medical and recreational use). If something with a notoriously high capacity for abuse is forbidden but more and more exceptions are being made until everyone starts experimenting with it, we’ve got a problem on our hands. Although there are any number of reasons you can come with as to why marijuana should not be legalized, the bottom line includes: its scientifically proven negative effects on health, the threat it poses to the environment, proof the growing marijuana industry is already treacherous territory, and how the financial difference everyone thinks it will make is really not all that great.

Marijuana has been proven to impair the ability to think and act sensibly in various ways. Its most common effects are: short-term memory loss, anxiety and depression, distorted sense of time, paranoia, and impulsive thoughts. It is also highly addictive (like any drug); withdrawal can and probably will make people ruin their lives trying to feed their habit while the dealers grow rich on their suffering. This, of course, is the reason the drug trade has become such a problem. When people not of the best moral character know they can make money, they're willing to exploit anything and everything in order to get what they want. Marijuana is addictive because of its high levels of THC. So, people are discovering more ways to increase the THC levels, like growing the marijuana in water. Marijuana has also been proven ...

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...e opposite to what one would traditionally think. Although it may be fair to some extent to hear them out, to seriously start giving them their way in the marijuana case and others like it is absurd. Society will always have vices, but its basic moral values are as important to it as legs are to a table. If you keep making the rules more and more lax, you'll knock out the legs one by one until there's nothing left holding up society.

In conclusion, several reasons marijuana should not be legalized are because it is dangerous to health, it harms the environment, it's already starting to backfire in the states where it is legal, and taxing it will not make everything better. Cannabis was originally not legal for a reason because it's a harmful substance. Now that you know all of what marijuana does, the damage it will and is already causing, what's your take on it?