Legalization of Marijuan

Marijuana Legalization

The legalization of marijuana is something that I have always been interested in. In high school, I heard about people first smoking marijuana, and I thought it was so bad because of everything that I was taught in elementary and middle school. Kids always pledged to stay away from any type of drug. Once I knew friends that were smoking and I talked to them about it, they made it seem so harmless, and that’s when I really got curious about it. Then I started to find out more information about marijuana and its effects, and I started to wonder whether marijuana should be legal for recreational use? After all my research I have come to the conclusion that marijuana should be legal for recreational use in the United States.

Lets start by looking at the economical perspective. The United States has a national debt of trillions of dollars, and a huge financial problem is how much our law enforcement and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are spending to enforce the prohibition of marijuana. “In America we spend nearly $8 billion trying to enforce the laws prohibiting the use and possession of marijuana” (Cartwright 86). This money could be spent on highways, schools and other government properties but instead it is spent on enforcing laws that are being broken every single day. Another huge part of the DEA is the so-called war on drugs. Mexican drug cartels are a huge supplier of marijuana to the U.S. “In 2009, the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center estimated that Mexican and Columbian drug trafficking organizations generated somewhere in the range of $17 billion to $38 billion annually in gross wholesale proceeds from drug sales in the United States” (Kellner and Pipitone 30). Granted all this money isn’t from marijuana sales but a good amount of it is. This is a huge amount of money that is being left out of the U.S. economy because it is illegal to grow and sell in the U.S., so people have to go elsewhere to get it. “Harvard economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Miron wrote a rigorous paper estimating that legalization could generate nearly $10 billion in tax revenue a year” (Brannon 16).

Some people argue that if marijuana is legalized the government would lose out on revenue from other important sources such as tobacco and alcohol. “Marijuana is the third most popular drug behind alcohol and cigarettes” (NORML). If people start smoking pot more often, one can only assume that the number of cigarette smokers will greatly decrease because of the health effects. “Cigarettes result in over 400,000 preventable deaths each year” (Daynard 290). Nobody can really predict how much revenue will be lost from cigarette consumption if people are converting to smoking marijuana. Another question is if the consumption of marijuana would decrease revenue from alcohol. While researching this subject I found a very interesting study about the substitution