Marijuana is dried out leaves, stems, and the flower of the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, that is smoked as a drug. Marijuana contains THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol and is the primary psychoactive constituent of marijuana. In other words, it is what gets a person high. Marijuana is a commonly used illicit drug in the United States.  The legalization of marijuana has been and still remains a controversial topic. There is a large number of the population that is strongly against legalizing the drug, and a large number of the population that is for the idea of legalizing it. Though illegal in most states, millions of people still smoke marijuana and have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the United States. 

Individuals who use marijuana smoke it in pipes, hand-rolled cigarettes or emptied cigars, and smoke it not only as a plant but as edibles, oil, wax, and shatter. Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana. Seven states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Although marijuana is illegal in most places in the United States, over 11 million young adults from the ages 18 to 25 have used marijuana in the year 2015 (National Institute on Drug Abuse). According to a 2015 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that 44% of people from ages 12 and older have smoked marijuana, 15.70% from ages 12-17, 52.70% of people from ages 18 to 25, and 46% of people ages 26 and older. With the data provided it looks like this number will increase, considering “the number of young people who believe marijuana use is risky is decreasing”. Marijuana is known to have positive and negative effects on the brain and physical and mental health (National Institute on Drug Abuse). The legalization of marijuana for recreational use has been a controversial topic among state lawmakers, including the lawmakers in the state of Vermont. In the book “Considering Marijuana Legalization: Insights for Vermont and Other Jurisdictions,” is a report that debates the good and bad consequences of legalizing marijuana. Supported by RAND Drug Policy Research Center, the authors discuss the current marijuana laws in Vermont, the size of the marijuana market, and the criminal justice costs that comes with prohibition (Caulkins, Kilmer, Beau, and Kleiman). They also discuss the consequences of using marijuana on health, prohibition, other outcomes. They talk about what could happen from regulating marijuana, how it can be taxed and how marijuana can be used for other sources of revenue. The book weighs the options and the policies and the final thoughts that Vermont should consider when considering legalizing marijuana (Caulkins, Kilmer, Beau, and Kleiman). Eric Single, a writer from the Journal of Public Health Policy, covered marijuana laws and reviewed decriminalization’s measures and breaks it all down. He also covered the results in the two states of California and Ohio (Single). After reading the various chapters of the book I came to the conclusion that the positive side effects of legalizing recreational marijuana outweigh the negatives. Recreational marijuana use remaining illegal in most states in the United States does more harm than good to many aspects of our nation. Keeping recreational marijuana use illegal will hurt the United States economy and even the people in a considerable amount of ways. 

The government should enact a federal marijuana law to legalize the recreational use of marijuana because of the medicinal effects, its cost on the economy, and its ability to give those people that were arrested a chance to continue their education or get jobs. 

The first issue with the illegalization of marijuana is the inability of its medicinal effects to be available to people. The article “How Marijuana Became Illegal” in the Washington Free Press revels how cancer patients have a difficult time dealing with treatment. Dr. George Wagoner, a practicing physician of 29 years explained how his wife was able to cure her nausea by smoking natural marijuana (Murphy). Dr. Donald Tashkin, the professor of medicine at UCLA said that “the THC in marijuana has well defined anti-tumoral effects that have been shown to inhibit the growth of a variety of cancers in animal models and tissue culture system”. Marijuana is used to alleviate pain and help tolerance for the user struggling with medical issues (Szalavitz). Cannabis has also been shown to alleviate the pain from AIDS, nausea from chemotherapy, glaucoma, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, etc. In addition to aiding people in the area of pain, Journal of American Medical Association saw that recreational marijuana smoke for entertainment showed moderate users having unexpectedly positive effects. Low to moderate marijuana users showed increased lung capacity compared to nonsmokers on two tests, FEV1 AND FVC (Szalavitz). When tested, FEV1 and FVC significantly increased. FEV1 is the amount of air someone breathes out the first second after taking an extremely deep breath and FVC is the total volume of air exhaled after the deepest inhalation. Different from cigarette smoking, cannabis users often hold the smoke in their lungs for as long as they can, thus improving their lung capacity. Dr. Mark Pletcher says this “practice” might expand the lung capacity and have unusually positive results. The authors of this article after learning the facts conclude that smoking marijuana in addition to pain and management of symptoms could have positive results on appetite and mood (Szalavitz). Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, claims that after lengthy amounts of searching he was still unable to find one documented case of a death from a marijuana overdose, unlike how every 19 minutes someone in the United States dies from a prescription drug overdose (Gupta). Dr. Gupta also states that he previously was against the legalization of marijuana, but after researching the issue more, realized that the pros heavily outweigh the cons; including economically speaking. According to Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron in his publication “The Budgetary Implications of Drug Prohibition”, legalizing marijuana would result in an increase of approximately $13.7 billion dollars that would go to the state governments, local governments, and federal government. Around $6.4 billion dollars in tax revenue would results from legalizing marijuana (Miron). In addition to the revenue that would results in legalizing marijuana, the government and taxpayers would save money from our law enforcement officials devote thousands of hours to arresting, booking, and imprisoning marijuana users. This is not including the amount of time and money being spent prosecuting, feeding, and defending these offenders. There are millions of marijuana users in the U.S., and this is becoming an issue for our jails and prisons; Many are filled easily and keep filling every day due to overwhelming amounts of drug convictions. These overflowing prisons due to large amounts of drug convictions are resulting in the need of more money to building new and/or bigger jails. 

Despite all of this many people are still against the movements towards recreational marijuana legalization. While I disagree with those people, I understand their reasoning as marijuana also affects brain development. When people begin using marijuana as teenagers, the drug may reduce thinking, memory, and learning functions and affect how the brain builds connections between the areas necessary for these functions. Marijuana's effects on these abilities may last a long time or even be permanent. (National Institute on Drug Abuse). A study from New Zealand and aided by researchers at Duke University showed smoking marijuana heavily in the teens resulted in a loss of 8 IQ points between 13 and 38. However, when tested on twins they were unable to support a direct relationship between marijuana use and IQ loss. This shows that the decline in IQ points is more likely to be caused by other factors and not marijuana use itself.

Legalizing marijuana would help reduce the rate of arrests in the United States and give the people arrested an opportunity at jobs or a chance to continue their education. It would also help the United States minimize costs and earn revenue from taxing and selling the drug. With the positive health effects that marijuana has, there really is no reason not to legalize marijuana. The war on drugs was declared in 1971, and still now in 2017 people are fighting against the illegalization of marijuana and if it deserves to be classified illegally with other drugs; I think it doesn’t. 
