Legalization of the Cannabis in the United States - Report Example

14 November Legalization of the Cannabis in the United s There has conventionally been a debate on the legalization of the cannabis in the US. The mixed uses and kinds of effects of the cannabis have made its legalization quite controversial. In the early 1970s, federal decriminalization, legalization and control of the cannabis were demanded by the presidential commission. After a lengthy debate, it was concluded that the cannabis should be decriminalized in order to reduce the substance abuse in the US. The report said, “…we have concluded that society should seek to discourage use, while concentrating its attention on the prevention and treatment of heavy and very heavy use. The Commission feels that the criminalization of possession of marihuana for personal use is socially self-defeating as a means of achieving this objective” (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse cited in McWay). Decriminalization of the cannabis primarily means replacement of penal sanctions with civil penalties that are significantly flexible than the period of imprisonment (Roffman and Stephens 328). Cannabis is a drug with a lot of uses and very little risks, so it should be legalized in the US. Medical purposes are the strongest reason why cannabis should be legalized. It is possible to use the cannabis for the treatment of myriad of diseases. Cancer chemotherapy causes such symptoms as vomiting and nausea in the patient. If cannabis is used for the treatment, its active ingredient THC helps alleviate the pretreatment anxiety and minimizes the nausea and vomiting. The patient loses lean mass and suffers from a low appetite in the AIDS. Selecting the cannabis for the treatment improves the patient’s appetite. In the case of muscle spasms, cannabis is useful because of its ability to reduce the spasms and ease the incontinence of the bowel. In addition to that, the cannabis also relieves the depression of the patient. Glaucoma is a sort of blindness caused by the build-up of pressure in the eye. Cannabis can be used as a treatment to release the pressure inside the eye. Cannabis also helps treat the asthma by opening up the lungs. Legalizing the cannabis will not only provide the patients with a legitimate way to get rid of the disease, but will also enable the scientists and researchers to conduct research on the cannabis in order to unveil more knowledge about their medicinal uses. Legalization of the cannabis means treatment of the drug abuse not as a criminal issue, but as a medical problem. The US government has wasted a lot of money in taking measures to keep the cannabis from being available in the market in the past. According to an estimate, the US government incurs a total cost of about $10 billion on an annual basis in her efforts to make the country free of cannabis. On the other hand, the State of California produces the legalized medicinal cannabis for a total revenue of no more than $14 billion every year (“Pros of Marijuana”). Therefore, if the US government legalizes the cannabis, she can tax the revenues and would gain additional money to use on the social well-being. This money can be used both to make the people aware of the negative effects of the consumption of cannabis on the health and also for arranging the treatment of the diseases caused by its consumption. The US has once seen the negative consequences of banning alcohol in the country. In the 1920s, selling and buying alcohol in the US was officially banned. This put the control in the hands of the Mafia that both produced the alcohol and supplied it to the consumers. The corner drug dealers in the 1990s have followed the Mafia of the 1920s in the same footsteps. The unregulated trade of the black-market with the legalization of the cannabis would help reduce the number of yearly suicides and natural deaths in the US and would also cause a decline in the violence in the country. Presently, a significant population of prisoners in the US has been jailed for making non-violent drug offenses. Such people account for 16.66 per cent of the total prisoner population in the US (“Pros of Marijuana”). The overcrowded prisons in the US are also incurring the government a lot of expenses. These expenses not only have to be provided with food and the essential commodities, but they can also not be employed during their stay in the jails so that they could earn and contribute to the GDP of the country. Hence, adding to the number of prisoners is a total loss for the US, particularly when a significant population has displayed the drug offenses of only the non-violent nature. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all drug arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public. (Klein). There are many prescription drugs including Alcohol whose overconsumption exposes an individual to different kinds of health risks, but cannabis’s overconsumption is not quite as harmful for the health. In the year 2009, the US Department of Health and Human Studies conducted a study in which it was found that there were about 69.7 million Americans that consumed the products of tobacco, while 4.2 million and 15 million Americans abused the cannabis and the alcohol respectively (“Pros of Marijuana”). There is no point of banning the cannabis in the US when such deadly products like cigarettes and alcohol are legally purchasable. Cannabis is conventionally criticized for its negative health effects but the fact that 1000 people in the US die on the daily basis because of the lung and other health disorders caused by smoking is overlooked. Another 550 people in the US die everyday because of their act of drunk-driving. Legalizing cannabis would not cause much harm to the US if cigarettes and alcohol have conventionally been deemed acceptable; them being more harmful for health than the cannabis (Ng). In addition to that, one of the biggest problems of the US in the contemporary age is obesity and such fast food companies as McDonalds and KFC are primarily responsible for the spread of obesity amongst the people. Not just them, the processed food industry in the US that happens to be one of the biggest revenue producers in the country has to be controlled to improve the health of the American people. When all risk factors are legitimized, singling out the cannabis in the US as a risk to health is not quite sensible. Cannabis is a drug with a lot of medicinal uses. It can be employed for a better treatment of a whole range of diseases than the ways they are conventionally treated with. Cannabis is not more harmful to the health than cigarettes. They are even lesser harmful than alcohol when looked at the death rate of the drunk-drivers in the US. The US is a country that has seen a failed attempt to abolish the alcohol consumption in the country in the past. The US should not indulge in banning the cannabis to reinvent the wheel. We have had lessons from the past. Moreover, the harm caused by the cannabis consumption would not incur the US government anywhere near the amount that the country incurs every year in taking care of the prisoners and placing hurdles in the way of the cannabis suppliers in the US. Works Cited: Klein, Joe. “Why Legalizing Marijuana Makes Sense.” Time Magazine US. 2 Apr. 2009. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. . McWay, Douglas. “Marijuana Legalization: The Time Is Now.” 1991. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. . Ng, Jern-Fei. “Should Cannabis/Marijuana be legalised?” International Debate Education Association. 7 Nov. 2000. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. . “Pros of Marijuana Legalization.” 2011. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. . Roffman, Roger A., and Stephens, Robert S. Cannabis dependence: its nature, consequences, and treatment. US: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print. Read More