Marijuana Should Be Legalized Essay, Research Paper

Should Marijuana be legalized?

Affirmative

We need fuel! We need paper! People are starving! The answer to these problems is grow more pot. If we really want to save the rain forest than that is the answer.

According to the U.S. department of agriculture you can make 4 times as much paper with hemp as you can with the same land area of trees, and you can grow another crop when you’re done. Plus it only uses 1/5 the chemicals and is + the cost of paper made from trees. In fact, before the 20th century the marijuana plant provided almost all the worlds paper, clothing, textiles, and rope. Guess what Levis and guess jeans were originally made from. Guess what

early drafts of the declaration of independence and the U.S. constitution were written on. And guess what the American flag, Guttenberg and King James bibles were made of.

in fact, marijuana can actually be used to power a car. You can make 4 times as much cellulose to make gasohol or methanol from hemp stems as you can from corn stalks. According

to the USDA hemp seeds have more digestible protein than soybeans and are cheaper. So we could feed starving people in third world countries because it has enough protein to live off of and is cheaper and healthier than meat. And for medical purposes not only does it help glaucoma and AIDS but it also has shown signs of combating herpes.

The reason that it was made illegal might surprise you. In 1936 Popular Mechanics reported on the invention of a new machine to process hemp with. They predicted that

marijuana would again become the worlds largest cash crop. The paper and cloth companies didn’t like this and neither did the pharmaceutical companies because you can’t patent medicine unless it has chemicals in it. So in 1937 marijuana was outlawed.

Now lets revert back to the present day. In 1996 1,506,200 people were arrested for drug

related offenses. Over 75% of these people were arrested for possession. The average sentence

length for drug offenses is 6 years 8 months. This is why there isn’t enough room in jail for

rapists and murderers. And what ends up happening is everybody ends up serving shorter prison

sentences. Does it seem fair to you that a murderer could spend less time in jail than someone arrested for a drug related offense. 23% of people in prison are there because of drugs. In 1996 3 FBI agents were killed in drug related investigations imagine if one of them were you’re parents

or friends. The stupid thing is that if the government legalized marijuana than there wouldn’t be a black market for them and all the violence would stop. The same thing happened back when alcohol was made illegal. It’s true that some people drink or smoke too much but they are going to get the alcohol or pot from an illegal source if they can’t find a legal one, and because of the economic principal of supply and demand there will always be a source to get something if the demand is great enough. Also if the government legalized pot they could make sure that people only took it in moderation.

The 1999 budget for drug enforcement is 8.8 billion dollars. Is this where you really want you’re tax dollars going. Other anti-drug programs are also being given billions of

dollars.

One of the main lies that the U.S. has perpetuated is that if you ever do drugs you can’t be successful. This is obviously untrue because the 3 most powerful men in our country have all admitted to smoking pot. Not only the president of the United States but the Vice-president, and the speaker of the house all admitted to smoking pot. In fact Al Gore has even admitted to smoking pot regularly up until his mid-thirties. Newt Gingrich has said that + of the white house staff had used drugs within the last 4 or 5 years.

I would like to add that I personally don’t use drugs but I think that they should be legal.