Marijuana

I know I already did a presentation about whether we should legalize marijuana or not but there’s just so much information that I’ve decided to do my blog post on this topic as well. For my presentation, I listed out the cons of legalizing marijuana, which were, more secondhand smoke, higher chance of younger kids to obtain it, and people could make a case to legalize other illegal drugs as well. There are also a lot of other cons that I wasn’t able to talk about, such as, more people being high if it’s legalized. More people being high could ultimately lead to more deaths because they could do stupid things while they’re under the influence and could either get themselves killed or kill others. However, a counterargument to this could be that even though alcohol is legalized, you rarely see drunk people on the streets. Another con could be that the average GPA for high schools would drop because studies show that marijuana users are more likely to fail or drop out of school. A counterargument could be that people only skip school to smoke because teens think it’s cool since it’s illegal. If marijuana were legal, then nobody would think it’s cool to skip school to smoke a legal substance so that should fix that problem.

I also listed out pros of legalizing marijuana such as, fewer users for other drugs, black markets and drug dealers will lose business and a lot of them will go away, and if weed were to be legalized, the amount of users would stay around the same number. Another pro is the amount of drug arrests would greatly go down. As you can see in the graph below, nearly 50% of all drug arrests are due to possession or sales of pot. That’s over 750,000 arrests a year. 

A counterargument could be that if marijuana were legalized and police stopped looking for it, they could turn their attention towards other illegal drugs and have those drug arrest rates go up as well. The last pro that I was able to research for legalizing marijuana is that we would tax the sales of marijuana which would give us billions of dollars extra. Washington state has already legalized marijuana and they’re projected to make an extra $1.9 billion in the next 5 years due to extra revenue from marijuana sales. I can’t really think of a counter argument to this one. I mean, look at how much money we could potentially be making in 2018 if marijuana were legalized.

 So, yeah. Sorry about basically doing another presentation on marijuana. I just felt like I had too much information in my head that I had to get it all out somewhere so I might as well do it on here.