The Negative Effects Of Marijuana

A topic that has been heavily talked about and has many different viewpoints surrounding it is marijuana usage and how it impacts a person’s health. Robert L. Dupont’s article “Legal Marijuana: Bad Idea Getting Worse” explains the negative effects of marijuana on people’s health while Walter Sullivan’s article “Marijuana Study by US Finds No Serious Harm” conveys that there are no bad effects stemming from marijuana. Dupont uses facts and real-life examples to make readers believe his credibility. This appeals to logos and pathos, making it an effective argument about the negatives of marijuana usage. Sullivan’s article does use facts and appeals to logos, but the information is questionable regarding its credibility because itis not said

. In Robert L. Dupont’s article about the negatives of using marijuana, he uses sentence type, and persona to aid in getting his message through to the reader. First of all, the certain sentence type that is present in high numbers throughout Dupont’s article is interrogative. About a third of his article contains interrogative sentences. One example of this is when he says more than one time “Why not?” (Dupont). Another example of this is when he asks “Why not do the same for other drugs?” or “Why quit when we are winning?” (Dupont). This sentence type is effective because asking a question makes the reader think about the issue and think about how it applies to real life, which would make it more appealing/effective to the reader. Also, after he asks a question, Dupont returns to state

It seems as if Sullivan expects his audience to have some expertise in the field of science, specifically biology, because of how technical the words he uses are. In his article, he talks about “hormone imbalance, inhibition of spermatogenesis . . . increased formation of chromosome deficient cells . . .” and he expects that whoever is reading something like this will have enough knowledge of biology to understand this (Sullivan). Another example of this is when he says “marijuana ‘can impair’ that component of the human immune response mediated by one type of white blood cell ‘the T-cell’” (Sullivan). This technical language limits the audience who can fully understand what is being talked about in this article, therefore it is not helpful to the majority of people trying to read/understand