Marijuana Should Be Legalized

This argument is riddled with faulty 'conventional wisdom'. 1. Money If your basis for claiming something shouldn't be done is that it costs too much then consider the following statistics: a. The US military spends 2 Billion dollars a day [1]. 5 billion of annual expenditure seems like chump change in comparison. Yet, nobody says that we should disband the military because it costs too much. b. American’s spend 2 Billion dollars annually on chewing gum. So the cost of imprisoning prisoners is the amount of money spent by Americans on chewing gum in 3 years. These are to put the figure of 5 billion into perspective. It may seem like a huge amount, but it doesn’t compare to our spending on some other things. 2. I will concede that according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org...) article, marijuana has shown to have positive effects on patients suffering from the mentioned diseases. Yet that does not mean that it should be legalized. Some statements in my opponents argument are blatantly false. Quoting articles [2]: a. Cannabis smoke contains thousands of organic and inorganic chemical compounds. This tar is chemically similar to that found in cigarette smoke and includes many of the same carcinogens (Cancer causing substances). Cancer causing chemicals in cannabis smoke have been found in amounts 50% higher than those found in tobacco smoke. b. People involved in the study which claimed that marijuana is not as harmful as cigarettes smoked up to 1 joint daily for 7 years, or 1 joint weekly for 20 years. This is upper limit of the amount smoked by test subjects, not an average or mean value. The reader would agree with me that a lot of addicts can easily smoke more than one joint a week. c. The debate is not between whether marijuana is better or worse than alcohol. he British Medical Journal recently indicated that "Drivers who consume cannabis within three hours of driving are nearly twice as likely to cause a vehicle collision as those who are not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” d. Looking towards famous personalities that have used marijuana is again faulty logic. The list named by my opponent is not an exclusive list of successful people. In some cases, weed may have nothing to do with their achievements (What does President Obama’s old weed habit have to do with his becoming president?). The claim that it makes people more creative is also wrong. Cannabis is often considered an atypical, unique and sometimes paradoxical psychotropic due to its vast and sometimes contradictory array of effects. The subjective experience induced by using cannabis can be considered stimulatory and yet also sedative or depressant. So it may or may not have an uplifting effect. Thus far, my arguments have mostly been a rebuttal of yours. The fact that there seems to be no good reason to legalize a drug means that there is no need to legalize it. For every one successful person to consume marijuana there may be ten others whose lives have been destroyed by it. Looking to successful celebrities and their drug habit for inspiration is like saying everyone should snort cocaine just because XYZ did. [1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org...