Francesca Schipelliti
Ms. Ferdinando
Language Arts 56
March 20, 2015 Oui Oui to Weed Marijuana is usually known as the drug that is a gateway to many other drugs, but is it really? The real name for it is called cannabis but many people use nicknames like weed, pot, reefer, ganja, herb, and hemp. What people don’t realize is that alcohol is more damaging and destructive to people. If you try some alcohol, you won’t go to jail. If you try marijuana once you could go to jail, or at least get in more serious trouble than if you were caught with alcohol. It could ruin the kids life forever just because of one little mistake. If marijuana wasn’t illegal people wouldn’t have lots of criminal problems too. The problems on the streets would go down tremendously and not a lot of people would be going to jail these days for that reason.
There are many different results to doing marijuana. Medical marijuana is a very helpful way of using the drug. You can help the symptoms of HIV/AIDS, cancer, and many more conditions by using marijuana (Volkow). When you get to be older, you will probably learn about pediatric epilepsy. A disease that can also be helped by the usage of marijuana. The problem is that Marijuana can also have some bad sides. The use of it can give you lung cancer, a daily cough and phlegm production, and respiratory problems. When people use
Schipelliti 2
marijuana they can inhale it many different ways. Marijuana can be smoked in handrolled cigarettes called joints or in pipes or water pipes called bongs (Anderson).
Many people try to disguise it in cigars or cigarettes that have been emptied. You mix it into tea, brownies, and other different things that are edible to create a more instant reaction.
Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska are four states that can produce and sell marijuana for medical purposes. Marijuana legalization won the ballot in Colorado and Washington in the
2012 election. Alaska, Oregon, and Washington D.C won in 2012 (Drugpolicy.org).
Teens these days in highschool are using marijuana more than ever before.There are nearly 23 percent, that are currently marijuana users. The seniors are around 6.5 percent have used marijuana daily since 2013 (
Volkow).
When something’s illegal, it creates something called the “forbidden fruit effect”, provoking people to try it. If it were to become completely legal, the government could tax it and get money from the product. The classification of marijuana is completely inaccurate, people with cancer and other patients are saying that the drug has never been linked to death. When you put marijuana next to alcohol and cigarettes, which are both legal, it is harmless. Marijuana helps headaches and migraines when there are medicines that cannot help.
The brain has many different ways of reacting to marijuana. When it is smoked, THC
(
tetrahydrocannabinol also known as the effects) pass from the lungs into the bloodstream, which carries the chemicals to the brain and other organs throughout the body (Zimmermann).
When it is ingested, THC targets on brain cells,
