Pros And Cons Of Legalizing Marijuana

In the United States, tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death. Approximately 480,000 deaths result from the use of this drug annually. The most common tobacco related death occurs by smoking the substance, usually found in the form of cigarettes. The second occurs by merely being exposed to its second hand smoke (“Fast Facts”). The average NFL football stadium can be filled five times over by the people whose lives will be lost because of this drug. The third leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. is alcohol consumption, which causes the death of around 88,000 people annually ("Fact Sheets - Alcohol Use and Your Health"). Marijuana, in comparison, is nontoxic and cannot cause death by overdose, but most people do not know …show more content…
The first is that people think that legalizing marijuana will send children a message that drug use is acceptable, but this is untrue ("Pros & Cons of Legalizing Marijuana"). Alcohol and tobacco are legal substances and are technically classified as drugs because they alters someone’s psychological or physiological processes and states. If people want children to stay away from drugs, they should level the playing field by informing them of all the substances that can be abused. This can actually be exemplified through programs, like D.A.R.E., that schools provide their students with. The second concerns the Gate Way Theory, which states that marijuana is a soft ‘gate-way’ drug that causes people to use harder drugs (i.e. cocaine, heroin, etc.) later. This statement should be disregarded because it doesn’t take other factors, like environment, into consideration. Marijuana is more available to people and can be more commonly used than other drugs, but its legalization wouldn’t necessarily cause people to make the decision to use harder drugs. Studies actually show that marijuana is scarcely a gateway drug compared to alcohol. Most marijuana users have never even tried hard drugs like cocaine (Dighe). While there is a chance that it can be influenced by previous drug use, the decision to use serious drugs is a personal …show more content…
According to a study conducted in 2010 by Jeffery Miron, a Harvard University economist, around $17.4 billion are spent by federal and state governments towards marijuana prohibition annually (Stuart). This amount has increased since, but no exact figure has been disclosed. The problem is that no matter how much money the government spends in order to strategically set law enforcement in place, illegal drug dealers will find a way to sell their marijuana. Because of the drug’s illicit status, the price of the product actually increases. The abnormally high price exposed to an addictive personality can lead to a dangerous combination; a person willing to commit crime in order to bear the cost of their drug dependence. Drug dealers don’t discriminate, either. They would be more than willing to sell to the younger population, who report that it is easier to obtain marijuana than alcohol or tobacco because of the regulations the government has set forth for merchants for those substances (“Pros & Cons of Legalizing