Where the Question lies Many people in the United States ask the question, “Why marijuana should be legalized?” when the real question is, “Why is marijuana illegal?” Marijuana was once a totally banned controlled substance in all fifty states. Slowly but surely the U.S states one by one are legalizing marijuana for medical reasons and so on. California and Colorado are the two states that have gone through their government and passed the law to legally sell and buy marijuana with the proper ID’s to verify acceptance. Some states have considered it before while other states hate the thought of legalizing this substance. Alcohol is a legal substance in our country yet people die every day from it rather it be liver problems or become a
People today are having a harder time arguing right and wrong because a growing number of people reject absolute right and wrong. Utilitarianism tells us that given a set of choices, the act we should choose is that which produces the best results for the greatest number affected by that choice. (Mosser 2010) When we look at the use of marijuana there is a smaller number of benefits verses the larger number it will adversely affect. Therefore by the ethnic principle of utilitarianism we should not allow marijuana to be legalized. Marijuana should continue to be a controlled substance.
As retrieved from: http://www.cnn.ru/HEALTH/9702/weed.wars/facts/medicinal.users/index.html Trebach, Arnold S. Legalize It? Washington DC: The American University Press, 1993. Pages 13, 33 Trebach, Arnold S. Legalize It? Washington DC: The American University Press, 1993. Page 43 US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, “In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition” (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 56-57. http://druglibrary.net/olsen/Medical/Young/young4.html Xu JQ, Kochanek KD, Murphy SL, Tejada-Vera B.
(Rand 2010) Rand Corporation estimates the cartels make about 15 to 26 percent of their income from marijuana grown and shipped into the United States. Annually the net worth to the cartel is somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2 billion dollars. This is not counting the marijuana that is grown and sold within the U.S borders. To lower the risk of being caught smuggling marijuana across the borders many cartels have started growing marijuana with in U.S including national parks, public lands but this still will not help their market value due to the fact that the marijuana grown in the U.S legally under a controlled environment will be a stronger strain and more potent than the marijuana grown in the wild or shipped from Mexico. This will leave a very small market for the illegal Mexican marijuana and the cartel will fight among them shelves for a very small market share.
Retrieved August 31, 2012 from http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/drug-trafficking-violence-in-mexico-implication-for-the-united-states In Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History. (2004). Retrieved from http://credoreference.com/entry/abcmexico/drug_trafficking Mexican Drug War Statistics. (2012). Mexican Drug War Statistics.
Every year our state has to spend a large sum of money on supervising marijuana because it is illegal. But once Proposition 19 is passed, those marijuana offenders and drug traffickers will be innocent. “The measure could result in savings to the state and local governments by reducing the number of marijuana offenders incarcerated in state prisons and county jails, as well as the number placed under county probation or state parole supervision”(Brown 14). This could save California millions of dollars annually.
(2011). Marketing Violence in Mexico's Drug War. NACLA Report on the Americas, 44(3), 31-33. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from the Academic Search Premier database. Kellner, T., & Pipitone, F. (2012).
In World of Criminal Justice, Gale. Retrieved from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/worldcrims/dare_drug_abuse_resistance_education DRUG EDUCATION AND PREVENTION. (2008). In Dictionary of Policing. Retrieved from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/willanpolicing/drug_education_and_prevention Drug Enforcement Administration Drug Trafficking.
Miron, J. A. (2005, June). Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States. In Marijuana Policy Project.
This completely natural plant which previously helped so many people has puzzled the leaders of our nation for a long time even before the whole concept of “Reaganomics,” which focused on drugs and its entirety. In order to understand why marijuana should be legal or illegal we must first understand what exactly marijuana