Legalization of Marijuana and Effect on Future Generations

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Legalization of marijuana has become an increasingly popular topic for debate in society. Support for this idea continues to rise, as “sentiment in favor of legalization has increased by 20 [percentage] points in just over a decade” (Dionne and Galston). The crucial ethical issue to consider in this debate is the effect of legalization on future generations. This can be divided into three ethical issues regarding risk, gender, and sustainability. The stakeholder of distributors is an important group to consider, as the dynamic of this group would change drastically if marijuana were legalized. The interests of this stakeholder are the following: profitable sale of product, compliance with legal requirements, and maintaining the reputation of the company. It is necessary to look at the impact on the distributors by analyzing the issues through application of ethical theories and principles in order to determine the solution to this ethical dilemma that will have the best possible outcome.
In determining the best course of action, one must assess the risks of each of the two extreme solutions and apply ethical theories of analysis to these risks. There are three main risk factors that distributors have to consider; these factors are: health concerns, dosage ambiguities, and driving inhibitions. This leads to the main ethical issue regarding risk, which is whether selling an unsafe product to consumers that does have known benefits can be considered ethical. Marijuana use has both positive and negative health related consequences. It has “been approved to treat side-effects of chemotherapy, AIDS-induced anorexia, nausea, and other medical conditions” (Elsevier). However, “long-term marijuana smoking is associated with an...

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...e legalization. One marijuana advocacy group created a series of guidelines that distributors should use in advertising. One guideline, relevant to gender ethics, was that one “should not depict scenarios that undermine or negate the basic human dignity of a person or group of people based on their race, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, age, and physical or mental ability” ("Marketing Ethics for the Cannabis Industry"). If marijuana distributors were to follow this then there would be no question under the utilitarianism theory as to if legalization was ethical in terms of gender ethics. Based on the ethical theories, the legalization of marijuana to lessen gender stereotypes in future generations can be argued as ethical, especially when legal distributors commit to following the advertising guidelines that prevent gender stereotypes.

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