Marijuana

Marijuana should be legal. The government is wasting money trying to keep weed off the streets when it should be reaping the benefits of the plant's many characteristics. If the plant were legalized it would be far less dangerous than most of us think. The profits would be higher than tobacco and the health risks would be fewer. Criminals would be less, and the world would be a happier place.

To understand why marijuana gets such bad press it must be known why it became illegal in the first place. Other drugs, like opium and cocaine were made illegal in order to prevent immigrants who were familiar with the drugs from obtaining an unfair advantage in the work force. Opium was banned because the Chinese immigrants used it to get through boring repetitive tasks. It dulls the senses and induced a trance like state that allowed the Chinese workers to work longer and harder than their sober coworkers. This was an amazing advantage in the industrial revolution when minimum wage had not yet been established, so the only way to make a worker competitive was to produce more than the competition. White people had one thing that the Chinese immigrants did not, friends in the government. To keep immigrants from running the locals out of the work force and into poverty the drug opium was made illegal.

After the war with Spain, in which Spain allied with Mexico, Mexicans began to immigrate into America and joined the agriculture work force where jobs were plenty and race problems few. It was widely known that the Mexicans had used marijuana during the war. When the Dust Bowl hit along with the Great Depression, the once plentiful jobs disappeared and Mexicans became a problem to society, along with their marijuana. Marijuana became popular among

musicians, mobsters, and those involved in the glamorous Jazz lifestyle. Upon the reversal of Prohibition the large police force that had been used to combat liquor, now needed something new to regulate.

The leader of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD) Harry J. Anslinger, who also had his hands in the paper industry, felt that jazz and the life style it promoted was detrimental. He fought hard to get Anti-Drug laws passed in all of the states. Around the same time paper companies could have undergone a huge remodeling by using hemp instead of traditional methods. This would have been a cash cow for some inventors and investors but Anslinger's Uncle, who had appointed him to the head of the FBNDD, had already invested a lot of money in current paper companies and did not want to suffer any losses. With new machines that can break the hemp stalks instead of doing it by hand, hemp papers is more efficient, cheaper, and environmentally sound than wood paper made with chemicals. However these methods were overlooked because they did not stand against influential investors.

Since then anti-drug groups have tried anything to give cannabis bad reputation. One such example is the leading anti-drug group Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.); they claim that marijuana "can impair memory perception and judgment by destroying brain cells". This so called fact came from a study done in the Second Reefer Madness period. The study showed that marijuana damaged brain structure in monkeys, the study came out with the desired results to back up the arguments of anti-drug organizations. However it was viewed by scientific community as incorrect and possibly tampered with and was later recanted. Since the study was done many other studies and experiments have been done none of them have come out with results anything like the one that D.A.R.E. still refers to.

Marijuana also gets bad press from anti-drug groups through simple scientific misunderstandings. A perfect example of this is the theory that THC stays in your fat cells for months and will keep you "high" for the same amount of time. This is not really the case. The compound THC that gets people "high" is actually "Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabiol". The human body processes this compound and depletes it in a matter of hours. Your body then mutates this compound into two kinds of metabolites that do not get people "high". These metabolites are called "11-hydroxy-tetrahydrocannabiol" and "11-nor-9-carboxy-delta-tetrahydrocannabiol". Unfortunately these non-potent metabolites have the word "tetrahydrocannabiol" in them so they look like the compound THC. Recent studies have been done with new technology have proven these facts (cannabis).

Another bad press that anti-drug groups have pinned on pot is that it is a gateway drug. This means that marijuana will lead to the use of other harder drugs such as heroin and acid that can cause brain damage. The truth is that marijuana contains chemicals that work similar to the way natural brain chemicals do. The chemicals in marijuana caress brain receptors, similar to legal drugs like alcohol. The big difference is that alcohol hurts and destroys the receptors it 'caresses' by introducing toxins, which kill brain cells and can sometimes induce mini-seizures, causing a person to vomit or lose consciousness marijuana will never harm these receptors (cannabis). Because marijuana does not damage brain receptors, users can get the same level of "highness" every time and find no need to advance to new drugs. The medical or scientific communities no longer accept the gateway theory. According to a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Judge "Marijuana is the safest therapeutically active substance known to mankind."

The big confusion is marijuana versus tobacco. Initially it has been found that smoking any plant is harmful to your lungs. It has been said that one joint contains four to ten times the amount of tar that a cigarette does, this is misleading. Though it may be true, it is also true that cigarette smokers generally smoke more than ten times the amount of plant matter than marijuana smokers do. Marijuana is more potent than tobacco therefore it requires less to smoke for the desired affect. Tobacco contains nicotine that marijuana does not, nicotine is responsible for most of the heart problems suffered by smokers by hardening blood vessels and is also responsible