America has been battling a war against drugs since Nixon's precedency. Nearly fifty years since the declaration, the government has been losing money by keeping citizens incarcerated for cannabis-based arrests. Rather than losing money by the millions annually, wouldn't it be beneficial to fix our countries monetary system by passing a single bill? Some states have done so and it seems to be working for them. This question interests me because the latter part of the 1900's generation was born into the problem that obtaining marijuana is illegal and the generation of us people seems to have taken the most offense to it. The fact that some people have been locked up for years in prison for possession of a plant baffles my mind, while pharmaceuticals and liquid poison has been sold over the counter ever since we can remember. Legalizing cannabis recreationally nation-wide has interested me because its one of the many things that is banned that makes many people scratch their heads and ask why? As research and sales have progressed the past decade, I've learned more and more as the years go on about the present day drug.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) put together a brief slideshow regarding marijuana-based arrests by the numbers. Slide by slide, graph by graph, ACLU presents the statistics regarding marijuana-centered arrests. The objective of the slideshow is to show the statistics of what race is most likely to be arrested, the money

spent on these arrests and the rate at which people have been arrested for cannabis the past few years. By presenting their information the way they did, it gets the point across to the audience in a thorough, informative manner. Information coming from the American Civil Liberties Union is credible because it is coming from a private organizations webpage that includes personal sources.

California Legislative Analysis Office put together a proposal about legalizing recreational marijuana in California alone. The report, written by attorney general Kamala D. Harris, confronts the law of cannabis being legal only medicinally in California, then goes on to explain the pros of the present day law, along with the cons. Major points of interest Harris hits is what would happen to the current offenders serving jail time, imposition of fees and taxes and how/which businesses would pursue hiring by drug tests. By hitting the subject from every angle, explaining it all thoroughly, the report is non-biased. The Legislative Analysis Office put together a proposal that was formal and credible enough to be presented to the California government.

The American Public Health Association published an article about regulating recreational marijuana as a pubic health priority. Informing the researcher with the current status on America's federal laws against the drug is what the article revolves around. Although the article posts a lot about the drug, there is no sources included to refer to while reading the online post. Since the article mentions all key points that could possibly be brought up regarding marijuana, there's really nothing to miss while reading it. The points that the article emphasizes the most though is effect the exposure would have on younger children, the increased availability of the drug and the health effects using the drug has on your body. Being that the information comes from a pubic health organization in a no-biased, informative way, its safe to say that the author wrote the article in a way to only inform the audience, not persuade.

Asking the question "should the United States tax cannabis legally?" brings up a lot of thoughts and concerns. By looking at the problem from any perspective, a person that concludes it would be beneficial to the country to pass the law could only do so logically by examining it from a business standpoint. If someone studies the issue at only a participant's standpoint, they'll have an un-legitimate, un-informative argument. While researching my articles, I agreed with practically everything they had to say. Since the sources I choose were un-biased, there truly was nothing to judge off them. By some of the sources looking at the issue from a statistic standpoint while others looked at it from a profitable one, my opinion did not change but my personal knowledge absolutely did. Revising my research question by asking who would benefit from recreational marijuana rather than how would the country benefit from such may be a better approach. By asking "who" it makes it a more logical question that singles out personal problems that may be approachable to a subject.
