Towards the end of February this year, Washington D.C. move to legalize recreational pot and on Tuesday, the very next week, the same was announced in Alaska. The states that remain behind are now fighting even more vigorously for their right to use pot legally. There has been one motivation behind this movement where the scientists have now found that marijuana is safer compared to other drugs; legalized alcohol and tobacco included. The recent research findings say that the dangers of marijuana have been overestimated in the past while at the same time; we have also been underestimating the risks associated with alcohol use.
There was a time when marijuana was openly legal and was being used for all purposes from medical to recreational. It was later being abused very widely following which the States government announced a complete ban on the use of the drug. The US drug enforcement Administration ranks all of the controlled substances in accordance with five schedules and accordingly, Marijuana along with other potent drugs like heroin is classified as a schedule I drug due to its highest potential for abuse and associated dangers that are ranked above all. However, since we have now analyzed again and found out that marijuana is not as dangerous as we set out to believe, it should be legalized in the US.
Why Marijuana should be legalized
Reason 1- The reason why we illegalized marijuana do not apply anymore
Reason 2- Weed is 114 times safer compared to alcohol
Reason 3- Marijuana does not take lives, alcohol and tobacco do
Reason 4- Marijuana is not really addictive, less addictive than coffee
Reason 5- There are medicinal benefits associated with marijuana that we are missing out on
The opposing views
Conclusion
The time when marijuana was declared illegal was intense in its political environment. This was a time when marijuana was famous not under its present day name rather was known as cannabis. So following the Mexican revolution in the early 1900’s, countless Mexican refugees crossed the US borders for refuge and brought their culture right alongside. One of these cultural practices involved the using of cannabis as a medicinal drug and a relaxant and at the time, the name that they used to refer to the drug ‘marihuana’ was new to the people of America. So in an effort to control and keep tabs on these Mexican immigrants in the US, the state government illegalized marijuana.
We are all well aware that the same circumstances no longer apply, and the reason for which the drug was made illegal has become moot now. This is a reason which should alone be good enough for us to rule on the legalizing of marijuana.
There was a new study carried out by a team of international researchers which ranks marijuana as 114 times safer when compared to alcohol. The reason for this is that marijuana becomes lethal when consumed up to 15 to 70 grams which are far greater than even a heavy consumer of the drug would use in the course of a day. Also, while alcohol has been classified as the class A1 carcinogen, there has been no evidence which could lead us to believe that the use of marijuana could in any way increase the likelihood of cancer.
In addition to the aforementioned analysis, there is yet another approach we could employ to measure how safe marijuana actually is. Luckily, we also have plenty of evidence to support this particular approach which states that marijuana, unlike tobacco and alcohol, does not claim lives. The US center for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that more than 37,000 deaths per year could be attributed to alcohol use alone. The story of alcohol overdose is separate altogether. The concentration of alcohol in the blood which could prove life threatening is pretty low; low enough that people could consume in a single day. The CDC estimates hundreds of deaths occurring as a result of alcohol overdose each year. In contrast, there has never been reported any death to-date which could be directly linked to cannabis overdose.
On top of all the factors already highlighted, alcohol is life-threating in yet another way in which marijuana is not. Research published in the Journal Alcoholism: Clinical and experimental research reported that 36 percent of the cases of assaults where the victim was hospitalized and 21 percent of all the injuries could be related to the use of alcohol by the victim. The American Journal of Medicine goes as far as claiming that even a lifetime of use of Cannabis could rarely result in visits to the emergency rooms. Alcohol is also a very major contributing factor to violent crimes whereas the same could not be said for cannabis. As per the estimates of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 25 to 30 percent of all violent crimes in the United States can be successfully linked to the use of alcohol. To put the same into figures, the US department of justice reports that 5,000,000 alcohol-related violent crimes come to pass in the United States per year.
Yet another revelation that puts our mind at ease concerning the consequences of legalization of Marijuana is the fact that the drug is not really addictive. This is amongst the many reasons why marijuana is illegal, and if we are in fact able to prove that it is not as addictive as we may think, we might be able to take this consideration off of the table as well. There are a large number of people who tried marijuana experimentally, and a majority of them did not become addicted. The withdrawal symptoms of the drugs are not as severe which makes it rather easy to quit the habit. It is important to note that there are in fact certain withdrawal symptoms associated with cannabis use which comprises of anxiety, depression, nausea and sleep disturbances. The drug is not very addicting when we compare it to other substances.
All of the matters discussed how marijuana is not harmful, and they had us half convinced but based upon just this evidence, we do not have enough motivation to move towards legalization. The remedy to the problem lies in us realizing that we are giving up on a number of medicinal benefits of marijuana in our quest to make it forbidden. For starters, Marijuana could be used to treat the eye disease Glaucoma, which exerts pressure on the eyes and results in the loss of vision.
The use of Marijuana could not only work towards the cure, but it could also slow down the progression of the disease and prevent blindness. The drug is also seen to reverse the carcinogenic effects that tobacco may have and resultantly, restore the health of the lungs in smokers. The same was also analyzed through a study which evaluated the effect of both the drugs on the health of the lungs in 5,115 young adults over a time of 20 years. The results of the research revealed that while tobacco users were seen losing optimal function of the lungs over time, pot users revealed results very opposite to that, with an increase in the lung capacity.
In added health benefits of Marijuana, we also come upon evidence which says that the drug could help bring under control the seizures that patients of epilepsy may be suffering from. Not only epilepsy but marijuana is a drug which helps downgrade the symptoms for a number of other conditions and the resulting seizures as well an example of which is the Dravert’s syndrome. The doctors these days are actually prescribing medical marijuana in states where it is legal for the treatment of many similar anomalies.
Another benefit which maybe takes precedence over a number of others is the ability of cannabis to stop the cancer cells from spreading. In cancer patients, the gene Id-1 makes more
copies of itself compared to the non-cancerous genes, which helps it in spreading quickly. In the use of cannabis, however, research shows that the expression of Id-1 was reduced and kept the cancer cells from spreading quickly. When used for medicinal purposes, marijuana is also seen to reduce anxiety in many patients. And while we are discussing the troubles of the mind, it is worth mentioning here that even though we have not found a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, we have been able to conclude that its progression could be slowed down through the use of marijuana.
People who argue for the illegalizing of Marijuana do so for many concerns that they hold. One of such concerns is that the use of the drug is seen to impair human judgment and that it makes them act recklessly. Another very major reason is that people mostly consider marijuana as the gateway drug which could lead to the abuse of more potent and threatening drugs like cocaine and heroin. Moreover, just like we highlighted in the same discussion, there is also considerable concern over the addictiveness of marijuana. People who are against legalizing of marijuana also highlight a number of health concerns that are associated with the drug. Going further, these people also say that marijuana was made illegal for a reason, and since the decision was made before, the same reasons apply equally to why it should remain illegal. When we take matters to the applicability of marijuana in medicine, these people who oppose also say that the manmade substitutes to many of these cures and treatments could work just as well which makes it needless for us to risk exposing our community to all the dangers that come with the legalizing of marijuana in the country.
The problem here is that many of these arguments could stand true for the use of alcohol and tobacco as well yet, both of these substances are legal under the United States law. So if marijuana can impair our judgment and if it makes us act in reckless ways, alcohol has the same effect and speaking about it objectively, the effect of alcohol in this regard is more pronounced. As far as marijuana being the gateway drug is concerned, research today has been proving otherwise. The Institute of Medicine in the National Academies of Sciences has a lot to say on the subject. It says that since youngsters start using alcohol and tobacco before they are of legal age, marijuana typically does not show in the picture and does not encourage the habit. So to sum it up, there is no conclusive evidence found yet which might confirm our fears of marijuana being the gateway drug.
Marijuana is also not as addictive as the other drugs in the market and this analysis also considers the impact of alcohol and of tobacco. So while about one-third of the people who experiment with tobacco fall in addiction, for marijuana, the ratio lie at only 9 percent of the people who start using. Even with alcohol, 15 percent of the drinkers are at a risk of addiction which is a ratio still higher than it is with marijuana. In refutation of the health risk argument, there may be health risks associated with the use of marijuana, but like we discussed earlier these risks are not as significant, and they do not even compete for the health benefits that marijuana does, in fact, offer. And talking about health risks, people who smoke cigarettes and use alcohol are at far greater risks of cancer and respiratory problems.
We also looked earlier into how there are far too many fatalities associated with tobacco and alcohol and nearly not enough with the use of pot. Likewise, for people who say that
marijuana was made illegal for a reason; the answer is no; not really. In the year 1971, the Assistant Secretary of health Dr. Roger Egeberg sent a letter to congress which talked about whether or not marijuana should be classified as a schedule I drug. In his letter, Dr. Egeberg said that the knowledge we had about the effects of marijuana was not enough, so he recommended that the drug is retained in Schedule I until we successfully complete some studies and know more about the effects of the drug. That means that marijuana is under schedule I for lack of evidence, and it is hard to say that the case may be any different with the decision of legalizing marijuana. And with all of the medical applications that the drug has the potential to be used for, it is not very practical to find synthesized substitutes for each and every one of these applications.
We have already legalized two of the substances, and we have also formulated policies suiting our needs that proved essential for the controlling the use of these substances to reduce the side effects to the minimum. Since the practice is not new to us, we could be optimistic about the results that we may be looking at with the decision of legalizing pot. Not only that but unlike tobacco and alcohol, the drug comes with so many medical applications that it makes sense to make it legal. If we can legally regulate tobacco and alcohol, we can give another try with marijuana as well.
Works Cited
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Reiman, Dr. Malik Burnett, and Amanda. How Did Marijuana Become Illegal in the First Place? 09 October 2014. <http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/how-did-marijuana-become-illegal-first-place>.
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Torres, Marco. Study Shows Marijuana 114 Times Safer Than Drinking Alcohol. 04 March 2015. <http://themindunleashed.org/2015/03/study-shows-marijuana-114-times-safer-than-drinking-alcohol.html>.
