Persuasive Essay On Legalization Of Marijuana

Marijuana has been a frequently abused drug for quite some time, but is just now receiving national attention on the controversial issue of the question if it should become legalized, and what effects this will have on Americans and their communities. Recently there have been many arguments made about how marijuana should be legalized for medical reasons since, for example, it is a great option for people attempting to manage their chronic pain. By legalizing the drug, many people will begin to accept the fact that it is okay and will result in an extreme increase in drug use throughout the United States. Marijuana is known to be a gateway drug in the sense that it leads to a person using narcotics that have even worse physical and mental effects

Deborah Peterson Small, executive director and founder of Break the Chains, Communities of Color and the War on Drugs and previously was director of public policy for the Drug Policy Alliance, asks an important question: “Why are we still not discussing the evidence: that the real gateways to addiction are poverty, trauma, mental health problems and the effects of criminalization and stigma?” She points out how these other issues are what cause these troubled people to begin using addictive drugs, and that “many promote myths about marijuana to justify the use of law enforcement and the testing of people for public benefits, jobs and exclusion from housing.” She explains how the majority of people that use weed are doing so in unproblematic ways, so legalizing it will protect them to do so without the fear of punishment. Comparatively, there is the fact that opioid overdoses fell with the legalization of medical marijuana. Colleen Barry, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research, says that by “using state-level death certificate data from 1999 to 2010, my colleagues and I found that the annual rate of opioid overdose deaths decreased substantially — by 25 percent on average — following the passage of medical marijuana laws, compared to states that

If the users do not seek help, they can possibly lead to overdose and death. I feel that marijuana should only be used medically for people that truly and desperately need it in order to manage their pain. If weed truly is a better option than opioids, then these people need to be careful to not become yet another victim of drug abuse. Whether drugs are legal or not, people will continue to use them and we are capable of educating the next generation about the problems surrounding addictive drugs in an effort to lower the number of drug related deaths. Overall, marijuana should stay an illegal drug since the effects of it are deadly and we should make a better effort to decrease its popularity within our