Satire Essay On Drugs

An estimated 88,000 people have died from alcohol abuse and poisoning in the past year, 42 in the past week, and six today alone. Now, how many people have died from an overdose of marijuana in the history of the drug? The answer is none, because you would have to consume more than your own body weight in less than an hour. Yet, knowing these facts, the government keeps it listed as a schedule 1 drug, which is the most dangerous classification known to the U.S. Government, whereas a drug such as meth, which has a proven to have an incredibly high mortality rate of almost 3,000 deaths per year related to overdosing on the drug alone. Concerned activists can argue about the ethics of legalizing the infamous drug, but they should consider the harm reduction that legally buying less

harmful drugs, like marijuana , from the government will allow.
The problem with marijuana in the U.S. is that we have not changed our policies on the drug in most states since the mid 20th century. The issue with this fact is, medicine and science has evolved since then, and we now know that the drug is much less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. The most common misconception about marijuana is the classification as an addictive drug, which after a study by the Scientific American, 91% of people who tried the drug never became addicted, and those who did had no chemical dependence on the drug, whereas a typical cigarette smoker has to suffer through withdrawal, along with other symptoms.
In the United States, citizens rely on the DEA to tell them which drugs are safe and which are unsafe.

This can range from cough drops all the way to vicodin. This is a system that on the hole has made a conscious effort to keep drugs in the right hands, and not let drugs like codeine go to anyone that doesn’t need it. However, with the field of science growing, society needs to consider the accuracy of these rankings. There have been countless teens who have overdosed through legal prescription drugs, with extremely harmful side effects, but that number hardly compares to the mass incineration of citizens possessing far less harmful drugs. While those drugs are by no means completely safe, they are much safer than opioids and narcotics. Knowing this, the government has yet to change this classification to help cater to today's knowledge. In a huffpost article, the author brings up the 2010 statistics of “in 2010, 38,329 people died from drug overdoses. Sixty percent of those were related to prescription drugs. In that same year, 25,692 people died from alcohol-related causes.” How many lives will prescription drugs and alcohol take until the United States legalize safer

alternatives?
Drugs in the United States have been and will always be a controversial subject. Both sides of the argument have been pushing for change, and both sides have relevant and irrelevant points. Many people disregard prescription drugs, and the ethics of weather to make pain medication as available as they are to a recreational user. But what many don’t consider is the harm reduction that less powerful drugs, such as marijuana, could do. With a total of 0 overdoses, and a typical dependence rate of around 9% of users compared to much higher statistics to already legal depressants, like alcohol. The choice should be clear to most on what to do about this public health crisis.