Legalizing Marijuana Research Paper

Marijuana has been popular for about 50-60 years now in the United States. People around the country have been rallying for decades in the hopes of getting Marijuana legalized. I too at one point was very into marijuana and thought that it could possibly benefit society with it being becoming legalized. Many feel strongly against the legalization of it, but that because they are afraid that more and more people with become addicted to it; therefore, creating a stoner lazy society. The staggering thing is that I know many people who use it chronically and still function at a high level in society. From my perspective, most things in life need to be handled in moderation. With that, I think people can benefit from its medicinal, social, and economic

held national referendums (we don’t), legal marijuana would be the law of the land. Recent surveys suggest 53% of Americans are okay with legalization and that percentage is rising every year. The deleterious effects of prohibition run from wasted resources to ruined lives. Our police devote thousands of hours to arresting, booking and imprisoning marijuana smokers, many of whom are otherwise law-abiding. The most unfortunate of these arrestees have spent over a decade in prison, in some cases for nothing more than possession of cannabis for personal use. “There were 658,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2012, according to F.B.I. figures,” the Times notes, “compared with 256,000 for cocaine, heroin and their derivatives.” These arrests take officers away from more urgent issues, and can have serious consequences for the arrested. “Each year, enforcing laws on possession costs more than $3.6 billion, according to the American Civil Liberties Union,” the Times explains. “It can take a police officer many hours to arrest and book a suspect. That person will often spend a night or more in the local jail, and be in court multiple times to resolve the case.” And as the Times explains, the ripple effects of an arrest can go well beyond having to appear in court: “The hundreds of thousands of people who are arrested each year but do not go to jail also suffer; their arrests stay on their records for years, crippling their prospects for jobs, loans,

After three decades, criminalization has not affected general usage; about 30 million Americans use marijuana every year,” the Times points out. But what about the “broken windows” theory? Perhaps cannabis users are more likely to be involved in other crimes, and arresting them for possession can nip a life of crime in the bud. This idea, as the Times makes plain, doesn’t hold up to the data: “The public-safety payoff for all this effort is meager at best: According to a 2012 Human Rights Watch report that tracked 30,000 New Yorkers with no prior convictions when they were arrested for marijuana possession, 90 percent had no subsequent felony convictions. Only 3.1 percent committed a violent offense.” If law enforcement agencies wanted to find a good “minor offense” correlate for violent, dangerous crimes, marijuana use doesn’t make a lot of sense. The high itself doesn’t inspire violence, and there is no real case to be made that smoking pot causes one to go on to worse crimes. Even the gateway effect—the theory that cannabis leads to other drugs—was discarded long