Blake Laferty
Professor Angela Eward-Mangione
ENC1101
21 October 2014
Medical Marijuana
Twenty three of our fifty states have already signed the bill legalizing the use of medical marijuana and over half are considering legalizing it for medicinal and recreational use. Marijuana is becoming very costly to keep illegal and I believe if signed into a bill to become legalized this will relieve the economy and help bring our country out of debt. This has opened the flood gates as to whether marijuana should be as readily available as alcohol. President Obamas recent works dealing with the legalization of marijuana have made it less complicated and easier to do business with legal marijuana businesses. Even though the drug is still illegal under federal law, Obama states that it shouldn’t interfere with the legalization of marijuana in the states for several reasons, suggesting if whether they’ll be victorious in keeping the drug out of the hands of minors.
So many of my friends have either used or seen marijuana and honestly hese days its harder to find somebody who doesn’t use marijuana opposed to people who do use it.
Many governors and officials plan on seeing how it goes in Colorado to cast their vote whether to support or not to support the drug. The tax revenue alone is enough to sway some financially struggling states. Rhode Island is one of those particular states. "Some feel its not an appropriate issue for an election year, and others want to wait and see what happens in Colorado," said State Senator Joshua Miller, a Democrat who s sponsoring the
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Rhode Island legalization law. "But a lot of other people are very anxious to take the revenue part of this seriously." Colorado is under the magnifying glass to see how the new rollout of the law is there, says Lyman. No matter what is signed into a bill, people will always be able to get ahold of marijuana and its costing our country big bucks to keep it out of the hands of people yet people still manage to get a hold of it. `
Thirteen years after Prohibition was put into act, it was abolished. During
Prohibition, people still drank and sold alcohol. Prohibition made law abiding citizens into criminals because of the law against alcohol. Nearly four decades ago, Congress passed the ban on marijuana for supposedly inflicting great harm on the society when in reality I think alcohol is more harmful and more dangerous than the use of marijuana. In my own experiences, I feel like I'm more in control under the influence of marijuana than the influence of alcohol. Most marijuana users are more laid back and easy going under the influence of marijuana but people who use or consume alcohol have tendencies to become a different person. Alcohol can make you do crazy things and cause such changes in your personal behavior and mental processes that even sometimes people under the influence of alcohol may even black out and not remember what they did while under the influence. Products such as alcohol and tobacco have the ability as drugs to get users addicted just as much as marijuana if not more. Addiction to me is not even real, you always have a choice and if you choose to use drugs then that’s your choice and you have to live with the consequences. There are health effects from the use of marijuana, but there are also health effects to everything including such legal products as tobacco and alcohol.
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"The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS -- or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe everyday."(Jocelynn Elders, MD) The American College of
Physicians or ACP, strongly support physicians and doctors that prescribe medical marijuana to patients who need it to be exempt from federal
