COMMENTARY: Legalization of Marijuana - Against
Someone was asking people on Facebook to give her ideas on how to write a 10 to 15 page paper about making a case on why legalization of marijuana should not be allowed.
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I don't do marijuana, and I suppose there's an argument if you haven't tried it, are you really qualified to say whether marijuana is justified or not? If I was focusing on writing a paper against it, I would take the angle that people used to deal with their problems on their own before marijuana. I don't know much about marijuana, but I assume the reason why people use medicinal marijuana is to subdue pain or reduce some amount of tension as a relaxant. I don't drink coffee, drink alcohol, or do drugs. So it's easy for me as a person who doesn't have use or need for it to find it of little value. The counterargument is that if you were afflicted with some kind of chronic pain or condition where you're in constant pain, medical marijuana minimize it. Children, who are burn victims, have found that playing video games serve as a distraction. I assume that's the reasoning behind medicinal marijuana. One could argue that video games or other distractions rather than use of medical marijuana that do not put some kind of chemical substance in your system could be used. Not only does marijuana dull your senses to minimize the pain, but it puts you in a vegetative state so that you're unable to do anything aside from lay around trying to pass the time. It's almost like you're not really living life, but just finding ways to pass the time till you die. Some people may argue that pain is unbearable or you don't know what it's like to be in pain every second of your life and how it can drive you mad. You just want the pain to stop rather than aching all the time. There are other activities one can do like painting or writing to serve as a distraction. In case you haven't noticed by the length of this post, I'm a writer. I recently broke up with a girlfriend 3 weeks ago and still suffering from heartache. I follow the path of the "tortured artist" who writes to distract himself from the pain. That's my pain. I just have to deal with it and live with it. I suppose I could just get high and take marijuana to stop the pain. When you're stoned, you've numbed your senses. However, once the effect wears off, you'll still have the same problem again. The pain comes back and you have to buy more marijuana. If you treat your physical pain like an emotional pain, there is no real cure for heartache. You have to learn to live with it. You have to learn to live with your grief or a pain that will never go away. You just have to face your problems. You can get drunk or high as a way of escaping your problems, but reality will always resurface. With getting over this female, I have all the reason in the world to get lost in alcohol or take drugs, but I don't because it's not my world. Since I've never had a drink of alcohol in my life, I don't look to alcohol as a solution. Same with drugs. I attribute that to good parenting, which a lot of people aren't lucky to have. You can write in your paper that marijuana isn't the solution. It's good parenting that teaches a person at a young age to make good decisions in their life that don't lead them down a reckless path that requires drugs as a crutch. Yes, some will argue that they couldn't help getting in a car accident that screwed up their back. Stuff like that happens, but if the majority of people led responsible lives taught by good upbringing, there would be fewer cases of turning to marijuana for a chronic ailment. One argument could be that marijuana is a quick fix to a long standing problem that was generated over a lifetime. As people live precarious lifestyles or where they don't eat right, don't exercise, and don't take care of their bodies, the body breaks down. So when you get older and you develop chronic pain, you turn to marijuana because that's the quick fix. Whether it's marijuana as an illegal drug or obesity of eating too much, there's a glut. You could argue in your paper that the government has a case in making pot illegal because the cumulative intelligence of the American society is irresponsible. Obesity is an example of that irresponsibility. It's about managing your weight and only eating what you need to stay healthy. However, because people are hedonistic and obsessive compulsive, they can't stop eating or buying foods that are bad for them even when they know it's not good for them. A large percent of America is overweight. It's lack of self-control. They don't have the will power to not buy food that will make them fat or know when to stop eating. That's why you see obesity. You can blame parenting, advertising, or whatever you want. The point you can make though is that if people can't control something as simple as food intake, what makes people think they'll be responsible with a chemical substance like marijuana? We live in a society where any time there's a mental or health issue there's a drug or pill for that. However, there's no quick fix or drug to cure Life. If a woman accidentally has a kid, there's no pill or drug for that. That woman has to deal with it. You could take the position that taking marijuana is like women who shop to make themselves feel better. You can go on a shopping binge and get that high from purchasing things. However, once the high is gone, you're back to where you started still in debt and where your problems didn't go away. Although people should be given the right to choose, the U.S. government does have a legitimate case in making marijuana illegal while the majority of people exhibit signs of being irresponsible with chemical substances. You could argue that the majority of the safety of people outweighs the number of people that would benefit from legalizing marijuana. If it can be established that people are immature when it comes to food and eating, legalizing marijuana for a minority of people that gives access to a larger percentage of the population who do not need to use marijuana or in that gray area where they would look to alternative healthier solutions rather than usage of cannabis is the better solution at this time.
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Someone posted later that my argument makes no sense. So I replied.
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For clarification, my post wasn't supposed to sound like a rant or like a coherent essay. I was going by Chelsie's request for "ideas" being "against legalization of marijuana." I personally don't care whether they legalize marijuana or not. So apologies if anyone think I'm waving the banner that it shouldn't. If Chelsie said she had to write a paper on why legalization of marijuana is good, I would have gone in the other direction. I'm just an Idea Person. When someone asks for ideas, I just spit information out like a Google search. I type really fast so that was just stream of consciousness writing. To spend more time typesetting it, expounding on the ideas, etc. would be like doing the paper for her, which is not what I'm trying to do. For best results, people should copy text to a word document and break it off into chunks of information. If Chelsie finds that there are portions that are good ideas, she can follow that thread and discard the rest. Basically, like a tree full of fruit. You shake the tree to see what fruit falls out. When people say my comment/post makes no sense, that's like shaking an orange tree and expecting a ready-made carton of orange juice to fall out. I'm not trying to give Chelsie orange juice. She has to take the oranges and squeeze the juice out herself. She posted something and what you saw posted in my comment was in 2 minutes. If this was a speech communication class where you had to pull a topic out of a hat and are supposed to talk for 2 minutes on the subject, that's my expertise. However, if we nitpick at how my post is all over the place, then sure. Even I'd concede it sucks :D