Parliamentary [0217] This house believes marijuana should be legalized

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[0217] Parliamentary.docx

Article A:

Should Marijuana Be Legal? Experts Weigh In

by John S Kiernan  |  Jul 14, 2016

Call it a sign of society’s moral erosion, an act of economic desperation or folks finally coming to their senses, but a record-high number of Americans – 61% – now support marijuana legalization, according to a March 2016 survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Such sentiment is the product of a decades-long shift in perspective, which has taken this hot-button issue from the realm of “I didn't inhale, and I never tried again” to "When I was a kid I inhaled frequently; that was the point." And that’s just commanders in chief talking!

But the topic of toking has in recent years come to a head, with four states and the District of Columbia legalizing the drug and another 16 states enacting some form of decriminalization, turning the rest of us into rubberneckers eager to see what would happen. The early returns have been promising for pot proponents, with Washington reaping $83 million in tax revenue the first year of legalization, while also saving millions of dollars on law enforcement resources, thanks to a 98% drop in low-level marijuana offenses. Similarly, Colorado collected roughly $41 million in tax revenue and saw an 84% decline in marijuana-possession arrests.

Not everyone is ready to climb aboard Puff the Magic Dragon just yet, however. From concerned parents to threatened corporations, the reasons for opposition are varied. For example, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest anti-marijuana lobbying groups, and a recent study from researchers at the University of Georgia perhaps explains why, showing that the average doctor in a medical-marijuana state writes 1,589 fewer prescriptions for anti-anxiety, anti-nausea and seizure medication each year.

With that in mind and much of the pot problem still unsolved, we turned to a panel of leading experts in the fields of economics, public policy, law enforcement and healthcare for additional insights. We asked them one simple question: Should marijuana be legal? You can find their bios and responses – including 19 Yes’s and 7 No’s – below. And make sure to share your thoughts on the issue in the Comments section, too!

Yes – Marijuana Should Be Legal

·        “Back in 1966, concerned that so many young people were harming themselves through the use of marijuana, I began to review the medical and scientific literature to help clarify the nature of this harmfulness. Much to my surprise, I discovered that it was a substance remarkably free of toxicity. In fact, it is far safer than any pharmaceutical or recreational drug. There is no record of a single overdose death around the world from its recreational or medicinal use. Compare that to aspirin, which is responsible for more than 1000 deaths per year in this country alone.”

- Lester Grinspoon, M.D. // Associate Professor Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

·        “We need to move beyond our completely broken prohibition model on marijuana to a sensible tax-and-regulate model. It’s widely recognized that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, and our law is dishonest in how we treat it.”

- Richard N. Gottfried // Chair, Committee On Health, New York State Assembly

·        “Cannabis should be legalized. Legalization of adult use of cannabis would change the landscape of cannabis use, and deliveries would be a key component in continuing to allow legal users safe access to quality tested cannabis while keeping cannabis out of the hands of minors.”

- Keith McCarty // CEO and Founder, Eaze

·        “If marijuana were legalized and regulated, thus treating it the same way we treat alcohol in this country, a number of positive developments should be expected to follow. First, we would put an end to the extraordinarily discriminatory fashion in which we have enforced our marijuana laws, which has done extensive damage to communities of color. Second, we could begin to treat addiction as a health problem, which is what it is. Third, we could begin to educate our children more honestly and, therefore, more effectively, as we do about alcohol and cigarettes.”

- Andrew Horwitz // Assistant Dean for Experiential Education, Roger Williams University School of Law

No – Marijuana Should Not Be Legal

·        “Though drug policy certainly needs reforms – people shouldn’t be given a criminal record for low-level pot use, and we need more treatment available, to name some examples – marijuana legalization is a very bad idea, unless, of course, we want to experience the 100-year disaster of Big Tobacco all over again.”

- Kevin A. Sabet, PhD // Director, Drug Policy Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine 

·        “One of my studies was related to marijuana use and the incidence of non-seminoma testicular cancer. I found an association. This association has been verified by two other studies. For this reason, among others, I definitely do not support legalization of marijuana.”

- Janet R. Daling, PhD // Professor Emeritus, University of Washington School of Public Health

·        “If the legalization of marijuana occurs widespread, then our generation will grow up to be a population of cannabis addicts who will pay little attention to their regular life. The only benefit of legalization of marijuana is to the older society for its medicinal uses, and will be unfortunately used for its pleasure and peer pressure purposes in the youngsters.”

- Chitra D. Mandyam, PhD // Research Biologist, VA San Diego Healthcare System

·        “Among the vulnerable, marijuana consumption increases the likelihood of progressing to schizophrenia by about fourfold. There is good evidence that marijuana is causal in this progression, perhaps in relation to the potency of marijuana consumed.”

- William T. Carpenter Jr., M.D. // Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, University of Maryland School of Medicine

Article B:

6 Powerful Reasons to Legalize Marijuana, From the New York Times

As the Times editorials make plain, legalization is prudent, humane policy.

By Owen Poindexter / AlterNet

July 31, 2014

3K265

The New York Times made history this month by becoming the first major national paper to call for the repeal of marijuana prohibition in an op-ed by the Times Editorial Board. The paper of record is continuing to make the case for legalization over a series of editorials, addressing the social costs, racist history and wasted resources from cannabis prohibition. The decision by America’s most reputable paper to take such a stand shows both the overwhelming evidence in support of legalization and the shifting status quo toward acceptance of new drug policies.

While President Obama seems to be coming around on the issue—he told the New Yorkerthat pot is not “more dangerous than alcohol,” and he even gave Colorado and Washington the thumbs-up to “go forward” with their experiment in legalization—his administration is still disappointingly conservative on marijuana.

The White House issued a response to the New York Times, trotting out weak, largely debunked justifications for criminalization, focusing on marijuana’s supposed social ills. The fact that the Obama administration felt compelled to respond shows the clout of the New York Times; the substance (or lack thereof) of its response displays an unwillingness to acknowledge the plain facts, gathered from eight decades of marijuana prohibition.

The American people, however, show no such reservations. A majority of the country now supports full legalization, and three quarters of the states have reduced federal penalties for marijuana and/or legalized medical cannabis. As the Timeseditorials make plain, legalization is prudent, humane policy, and it is past time for the federal government to act.

Here are six powerful reasons from the New York Times' recent editorials to end marijuana prohibition.

1. Prohibition has enormous social costs.

The deleterious effects of prohibition run from wasted resources to ruined lives. Our police devote thousands of hours to arresting, booking and imprisoning marijuana smokers, many of whom are otherwise law-abiding. The most unfortunate of these arrestees have spent over a decade in prison, in some cases for nothing more than possession of cannabis for personal use.

“There were 658,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2012, according to F.B.I. figures,” the Times notes, “compared with 256,000 for cocaine, heroin and their derivatives.”

These arrests take officers away from more urgent issues, and can have serious consequences for the arrested.

“Each year, enforcing laws on possession costs more than $3.6 billion, according to the American Civil Liberties Union,” the Times explains. “It can take a police officer many hours to arrest and book a suspect. That person will often spend a night or more in the local jail, and be in court multiple times to resolve the case.”

And as the Times explains, the ripple effects of an arrest can go well beyond having to appear in court:

“The hundreds of thousands of people who are arrested each year but do not go to jail also suffer; their arrests stay on their records for years, crippling their prospects for jobs, loans, housing and benefits.”

With persistent unemployment and underemployment, and many parts of the country experiencing a housing crunch, a single marijuana arrest can have dire consequences.

2. The benefits of criminalization are minuscule to nonexistent.

Cannabis prohibition is quite costly, but so are other government initiatives. A fair analysis of criminalization must also consider its benefits. The thing is, it’s not clear that there are any.

One of the strangest aspects of the war on drugs is how completely it has failed at reducing drug use, despite costing over $51 billion annually, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

“After three decades, criminalization has not affected general usage; about 30 million Americans use marijuana every year,” the Times points out.

But what about the “broken windows” theory? Perhaps cannabis users are more likely to be involved in other crimes, and arresting them for possession can nip a life of crime in the bud.

This idea, as the Times makes plain, doesn’t hold up to the data:

“The public-safety payoff for all this effort is meager at best: According to a 2012 Human Rights Watch report that tracked 30,000 New Yorkers with no prior convictions when they were arrested for marijuana possession, 90 percent had no subsequent felony convictions. Only 3.1 percent committed a violent offense.”

If law enforcement agencies wanted to find a good “minor offense” correlate for violent, dangerous crimes, marijuana use doesn’t make a lot of sense. The high itself doesn’t inspire violence, and there is no real case to be made that smoking pot causes one to go on to worse crimes. Even the gateway effect—the theory that cannabis leads to other drugs—was discarded long ago.

3. Prohibition is racist.

In one of its series of editorials, the Times reviews the history of cannabis criminalization, and finds it has been racist from the outset in the 1930s. The campaign to make pot illegal was “firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at the time.” The word “marijuana” was popularized as a way to associate the plant with Mexicans.

Harry Anslinger, criminalization’s biggest champion, is responsible for any number of quotes that sound like satire, but formed the basis of the movement to make cannabis illegal:

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers,” Anslinger declared. “Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Fast-forward to present day, and the words we use around marijuana have improved, but our actions have not.

“Whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly the same rates; on average, however, blacks are 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession, according to a comprehensive 2013 report by the A.C.L.U.,” the Times lays out. “In Iowa, blacks are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested, and in the worst-offending counties in the country, they are up to 30 times more likely to be arrested. The war on drugs aims its firepower overwhelmingly at African-Americans on the street, while white users smoke safely behind closed doors.”

This racial disparity has been present throughout the life of marijuana prohibition. While the obvious solution for a proponent of criminalization would be for police to arrest more white pot smokers—after all, they are criminals too, aren’t they?—no one seems to want to lead that charge. Instead, the drug war, however well meaning its supporters, is in practice, a blatant assault on minorities and their economic mobility.

4. Cannabis has legitimate medical effects.

The narrative of cannabis as a harmful drug has been dominant for so long, that many people had trouble accepting the plant’s demonstrated medicinal effects. Opinions on medical marijuana have shifted dramatically in the last two decades: this year, a slew of mostly conservative states passed laws permitting epilepsy patients to use strains of cannabis high in CBD. These states joined 23 others with broader medical marijuana laws. While the federal government still lists cannabis as a Schedule I drug, meaning it does not acknowledge any legitimate medical use, the states clearly disagree.

The Times lists epilepsy, along with pain from AIDS and nausea from chemotherapy as afflictions that cannabis has been shown to alleviate. One could add glaucoma, Crohn’s disease and muscle spasms related to multiple sclerosis, and a host of other conditions to those marijuana has effectively treated.

Despite the growing number of states with some form of medical law, cannabis is still difficult and risky to obtain for millions of people who could benefit from it. Loosening marijuana laws would help many of these people, and repealing prohibition would help all of them.

5. Legalization won’t lead to increased use.

There is reason even for people who oppose the use of marijuana to support its legalization: legal substances can be controlled in ways illegal ones cannot.

“Science and government have learned a great deal, for example, about how to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors,” the Times explains. “Mandatory underage drinking laws and effective marketing campaigns have reduced underage alcohol use to 24.8 percent in 2011, compared with 33.4 percent in 1991. Cigarette use among high school students is at its lowest point ever, largely thanks to tobacco taxes and growing municipal smoking limits. There is already some early evidence that regulation would also help combat teen marijuana use, which fell after Colorado began broadly regulating medical marijuana in 2010.”

It is the illegal market, with no standards, regulations or price controls, that poses a menace to public health. Our current federal laws, which treat cannabis as equivalent to cocaine and heroin, mostly teach teenagers that the government is completely unrealistic on matters of drug policy. Legalization is the first step in a broader initiative of treating cannabis use as a public health issue.

6. Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.

American history has a good analog for cannabis prohibition: alcohol prohibition. With both, use of the substance did not stop, laws were selectively enforced and violent gangs made staggering profits filling a market law-abiding merchants could no longer touch. In the end, despite alcohol’s costs to bodily health, and the alarming effects it can have on behavior, it was determined, rightly, that criminalizing alcohol did more harm than good.

Marijuana is less addictive than tobacco or alcohol, and compares favorably to those drugs on nearly every health metric.

“There is honest debate among scientists about the health effects of marijuana,” the Times writes, “but we believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco. Moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults. Claims that marijuana is a gateway to more dangerous drugs are as fanciful as the ‘Reefer Madness’ images of murder, rape and suicide.”

In fact, as the Times notes, cannabis is not particularly harmful:

“Casual use by adults poses little or no risk for healthy people. Its effects are mostly euphoric and mild, whereas alcohol turns some drinkers into barroom brawlers, domestic abusers or maniacs behind the wheel.”

The editorial further explains that cannabis has never been directly linked to any serious disease, the way tobacco has with cancer or alcohol with cirrhosis. Even the lungs don’t seem to take much abuse from marijuana:

“The very heaviest users can experience symptoms of bronchitis, such as wheezing and coughing, but moderate smoking poses little risk. A 2012 study found that smoking a joint a day for seven years was not associated with adverse effects on pulmonary function. Experts say that marijuana increases the heart rate and the volume of blood pumped by the heart, but that poses a risk mostly to older users who already have cardiac or other health problems.”

The more one examines the evidence, the less it seems there is any reason at all for cannabis prohibition to remain in place. The United States’ experiment in marijuana prohibition has failed spectacularly. The initial justifications for this experiment don’t hold up to basic moral standards, and the reasons to continue it can’t withstand objective analysis.

For decades, the United States has attempted to clamp down on a plant with limited capacity to do harm and tremendous ability to do good, and the results have been disastrous. It is as clear now as it has ever been: the time has come to end marijuana prohibition.

Article C:

5 Reasons Marijuana Should Remain Illegal

Posted: Jan 21, 2014 12:01 AM

How did we end up in a world where Big Gulps are being banned in New York while the welcome mat for potheads is being rolled out in Colorado? How is it that cigarette smokers are pariahs, while people smoking weed are being cheered? This is despite the fact that potheads are almost universally recognized as unmotivated, low class, degenerate – and, yes, smelly failures. Even the ones that get somewhere in life, like Barack Obama, usually turn out to be mediocrities.

Moreover, we all recognize that smoking is a dirty habit that makes you die younger while drinking is a potentially dangerous habit that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, but we want to condone pot use on top of that? That's like saying you've got a bad back and a bad shoulder; so why not break your knee cap to top it all off. How many lives are we willing to flush down the drain because a significant number of Americans tried pot a handful of times in their lives, got away with it and now feel guilty about it? One hundred for every person in prison? 1000? 10,000? There's a reason pot was made illegal in the first place and quite frankly, the only reason alcohol and cigarettes are legal is because they're so deeply ingrained in our society that we can't get rid of them.

There is certainly a financial and human cost to keeping marijuana illegal and we can see it in our prisons. But, there would be an even larger cost to making it legal.

1) It's extremely addictive for some people: If you don't want to take my word for it, listen to Dr. Drew Pinsky who has been working with addicts for decades.

It would be malpractice to say that cannabis isn't addictive. Anybody who's experienced it, actually been addicted to it, knows how profound that addiction is.... The difficult thing about marijuana addiction is some people, even though they're addicted can do fine with it for many many years before they start to have difficultly, but eventually the high starts wearing off, people start smoking a lot more to try to get that high back and that's when they descend into difficulties. ...I've been treating cannabis addiction for 20 years. When people are addicted to cannabis, cocaine and alcohol the drug they have the most difficult time giving up is the cannabis. It is extremely addictive...for some people. I think that's where people get confused. It's not very addictive for many people. It's a small subset of people with a genetic potential for addiction. But for them it is really tough. You only need talk to them, they'll tell you how tough it is.

Additionally, that "small subset" Dr. Drew is talking about isn't so small in a big country like America. "Of the 7.3 million persons aged 12 or older classified with illicit drug dependence or abuse in 2012, 4.3 million persons had marijuana dependence or abuse." It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the more legal and available marijuana becomes, the higher those numbers are going to go.

2) This experiment hasn't worked out so well for Amsterdam: Humans being what they are, just about any stupid idea we can come up with has already been tried somewhere else. Amsterdam is the most famous place across the world that has effectively legalized pot. It has even turned into a tourist destination for potheads. Legalizing weed has been a huge success there, right? Actually, not so much...

Its citizens are now alarmed that their children are increasingly being exposed to it.

Amsterdam today became the first city in the Netherlands to ban students from smoking marijuana at school.

The city's mayor Eberhard van der Laan introduced the law after school chiefs complained about pupils turning up to classes high after rolling up outside the grounds.

Marijuana is widely available in Holland as, although it is technically illegal, police can't prosecute people for possession of small amounts.

But it has also had the unwanted side effect that Dutch children are frequently exposed to the drug in public areas.

Additionally, contrary to the claims that legalizing it will reduce crime, in Amsterdam it’s been found that crime is now centering around the coffeehouses where marijuana is sold.

…Certainly the outlook for coffee shops is bleak. Among the few policies that the three parties in the new coalition government agree on is the need to reduce their numbers. The governing agreement released last week laid out plans that will force them to become members-only clubs and shut down those shops located near schools.

The coalition is also advancing the idea of prohibiting the sale of cannabis to non-Dutch residents, which amounts to a death knell for many coffee shops.

...The circumstances that led to the tolerance policies have changed in the past decade, as large-scale crime around coffee shops and the legal sex trade became more visible. In particular, the absence of legal means for coffee shops to obtain cannabis has highlighted their association with organized crime.

But the open-minded instincts that helped foster the policies are also being questioned. And it is not just the far-right opposing coffee shops. The traditional parties of power on the center-right, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal VVD, have also moved against the policies they once promoted.

That doesn't exactly sound like a success story, does it?

3) Marijuana is terrible for your mental health: Marijuana may even be WORSE than cigarettes. At least cigarettes don't peel points off of your IQ.

A recent Northwestern University study found that marijuana users have abnormal brain structure and poor memory and that chronic marijuana abuse may lead to brain changes resembling schizophrenia. The study also reported that the younger the person starts using marijuana, the worse the effects become.

In its own report arguing against marijuana legalization, the American Medical Association said: "Heavy cannabis use in adolescence causes persistent impairments in neurocognitive performance and IQ, and use is associated with increased rates of anxiety, mood and psychotic thought disorders."

So, there's a good reason most habitual marijuana users come off as stupid. The drug is making them stupider, even when they're not high. You really want your kids on that?

4) Marijuana is terrible for your physical health: How bad is marijuana for you? It's even more toxic than cigarette smoke. Regular users are hit with devastating lung problems as much as 20 years earlier than smokers. Even small amounts of marijuana can cause temporary sterility and it has a terrible impact on the babies of women who smoke including "birth defects, mental abnormalities and increased risk of leukemia in children." If your standard is, "Well, it's better for you than Meth or Crack," that's true, but you're deluding yourself if you think pot is anything other than absolutely horrible for your health.

5) The drug decimates many people's lives: Movies portray potheads as harmless, fun-loving people who spend their time giggling and munching Cheetos, but they don't show these people when they're flunking out of school, losing their jobs, frustrated because they can't concentrate or losing the love of their lives because they just don't want to be with a pot smoking loser anymore. Even in the limited number of studies that are out there, the numbers are stark.

A study of 129 college students found that, among those who smoked the drug at least twenty-seven of the thirty days before being surveyed, critical skills related to attention, memory and learning were seriously diminished. A study of postal workers found that employees who tested positive for marijuana had 55% more accidents, 85% more injuries and a 75% increase in being absent from work. In Australia, a study found that cannabis intoxication was responsible for 4.3% of driver fatalities.

...Students who use marijuana have lower grades and are less likely to get into college than nonsmokers. They simply do not have the same abilities to remember and organize information compared to those who do not use these substances.

It's bad enough that we already lose so many Americans to cigarettes, alcoholism, and drunken driving. Do we really want to endorse the loss of millions more potentially productive Americans via Marijuana? Do we move on from there to Crack, Heroin or Meth? Some people would say, “If they want to do it, great, then it's no business of ours.” But, you can also bet that those same people will be complaining about all the junkies and welfare cases that will be created by the policy they endorsed.

So, ask yourself a few key questions. Is legalizing Marijuana going to make this a better country or a worse one? Would you want to live in a neighborhood filled with people who regularly smoke marijuana? Would you want your kids regularly smoking pot? Now is the time to think about it because although it's easy to thoughtlessly legalize a drug like marijuana, when things go predictably wrong down the road, it will be a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than people seem to think.

Reference

Article A: https://wallethub.com/blog/should-marijuana-be-legal/22967/

Article B: http://www.alternet.org/drugs/6-powerful-reasons-new-york-times-says-end-marijuana-prohibition

Article C: http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/01/21/5-reasons-marijuana-should-remain-illegal-n1782086

[Eric]

this one's gonna be for all the marbles 😏

[cindy]

very interesting topic :-)

[Young]

We had this topic before, always heated debate with it

[이용진]

My kind of topic, ya'll know what side Ill be on lol