Have you ever thought about how the United States allows harmful substances like alcohol to be legal, yet classify marijuana, a less harmful drug, as illegal? Alcohol has been a staple of United States society, even though the negative effects of marijuana are widely known and experienced daily. The War on Drugs is a war that’s been around in United States history for a long time. One of the drugs that is identified as an issue by our government is marijuana, it is classified up there with those drugs. 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. After studying the effects of recreational marijuana use, I believe that 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. 

Individuals who use marijuana smoke it in pipes, hand-rolled cigarettes or emptied cigars, and smoke it not only as a plant but oil, wax, shatter, and even eat it as edibles! The other ways that users smoke this marijuana, like the use of dabs, it more concentrated dosses of cannabis by extracting the THC and other constituents that aid in getting a person high. 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). In addition to costs and laws, there are methods and facts about how legalizing marijuana would help health, prohibition, regulating, taxing, etc. 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. Single covers the results in the states of California and Ohio and it only furthered my idea that the positive side effects of legalizing marijuana outweigh the bad. 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 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 after being in significant amounts of pain, 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 various medical issues (Szalavitz). Cannabis has also been shown to be the ONLY thing able alleviate the pain from AIDS, nausea from chemotherapy, glaucoma, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, etc. Not only does marijuana use help people in extreme amounts of pain, but it’s it not that bad for the lungs anyways. 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 has 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). John Infold’s article in the Denver Post, “After Two Years, Debate Remains Over Marijuana Legalization’s Impacts”, shows the result of recreational marijuana legalization in Colorado. The results shown by this article prove that the sales of recreational marijuana thrived; Nearly $700 million dollars of medical and recreational marijuana was sold in 2014, and greatly past that number in the next two months (Infold). According to The Colorado Department of Revenue, in 2015, marijuana sales by government licensed stores in the state totaled to almost $1 billion dollars. Now Colorado has over half a million growing plants made for shops and has seen a decrease is misdemeanors and crimes related to the marijuana industry. Starting in 2010, charges relating to marijuana shrank to 2,100 in 2014 (Infold).  The results from the state of Colorado is what I can use to show the effects on regulating and taxing marijuana; how it is safer and can make a profit. 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. 
