Marijuana Use Is Harmful

Final Project

Marijuana Use Is Harmful

Mariah Di Toto

4/20/2014

CRT 205

Source #1 Title and Citation: Marijuana Use is Harmful

This article is convincing readers that marijuana use is harmful for your memory, coordination and respiratory functions. It is also found to raise the risks of heart attacks, cancer and addiction.

The only areas that seem to be vague is where this article starts talking about the effects of marijuana, and not explaining how much it takes before it effects you in those ways. Also how long a person has to be a marijuana user in order for these long term effects to actually start to arise. They seem to not know exactly what the long-term effects on the brain are, but says it effects your memory. Their finding seems to be inconsistent, so their argument for saying it is actually bad for your memory can’t actually be proven 100%.

I do find this source to be credible based off of the information that is given. This article is broken up into sections that talk about the main effects of marijuana usage. It lists statistics throughout the article and studies that have been conducted. However, I do believe they are only taking one side where marijuana can be useful in a lot of cases not mentioned here. It isn’t all negatives when it comes to marijuana usage.

I do not believe that any rhetorical devices were used by this author. The author stuck to simple details and studies, and did not go on exaggerating or relating marijuana use to anything other than the details.

I think that the fallacy, hasty generalization was used throughout this article. Mainly because this fallacy makes the assumption that a whole group or idea is a certain way because of a small amount of sources. In this article they provide all negative effects of marijuana use, when we all know that there are medically proven studies that it helps people with some diseases. So this author is making a hasty generalization that all marijuana use is bad for you. This author also used the fallacy appeal to pity. I think making the reader scared or nervous about marijuana use by giving the bad and negative details of this drug.

This author argues that marijuana use is bad for you and affects school, work and the social life of people. The author states that marijuana users compared to nonsmokers in school seem to get lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school. Also in the workforce a study among postal workers who were tested positive for marijuana for a pre-employment had higher numbers of accidents. In conclusion these studies