Legalization of marijuana - Essay Example

Therefore, this paper will seek ideas to develop an argument for and against legalization of marijuana, through elaboration of the ideas from different sources. Prohibition of marijuana is considered a misguided and ineffective policy, which has not contributed to reduction of marijuana consumption, since the government use funds to implement the policy, instead of collecting tax revenue from sales of legal marijuana. The government spends over ten billion dollars every year on enforcement of drug laws, thus resulting to cost of drug prohibition being wasted on the law enforcement resources.

Therefore, government should impose a tax on sales of marijuana, hence eliminate the violence related to the organized drug trafficking (Edelson, 2012). Legalization of marijuana is also associated with a positive impact of lowering the crimes, since the regulation of drugs distribution can result to a reduction of the drug disputes, hence decreasing drug related crimes, besides, the use of marijuana can no longer be considered a crime resulting to a decreased number of criminals. Moreover, the prices of marijuana would decrease, thus cause a subsequent reduction in the crimes such as theft cases.

On the other hand, prohibition of marijuana results to thousands arrests annually involving non-violent offences. The legalization would also make the police officers focus on serious crimes such as robberies, sexual assaults, violence, child abuse, burglaries and drunk driving. A relationship has been established between abuses of food intakes and the top ten leading causes of deaths in the world, but marijuana has never been mentioned; thus, there are no death tolls related to use or abuse of cannabis.

In fact, the use of marijuana has not shown evidence related to causing health problems like cancer or heart disease; hence, it is considered harmless. Nevertheless, there