Each year, nearly 800,000 people are arrested in the United States for marijuana possession. Is smoking pot criminal?

Is it akin to assault, to theft, to murder? Should people be put in jail for being high? Do they go to jail for being drunk, for buying beer, for smoking cigarettes?

Whether a user is causing harm to the public is of no concern to the law, and the result is the persecution of an enormous number of people whom I believe have committed no true crime at all. In Washington, the victimless crime of smoking marijuana, even in the safety and security of one’s own home, can land the smoker up to five years in prison, as well as a possible $10,000 fine, and after this unnecessary and unreasonable punishment is implemented, society will not have benefited in the slightest.

Sensible adults deserve the legal permission to responsibly possess and smoke marijuana, and its production and sale should be permitted and regulated by the American government.

No one is spared when it comes to the menacing gavel of marijuana prohibition. Not the peaceful, not the passive, and not the private. Even those few with prescriptions for medicinal marijuana are not truly protected from prosecution due to the differences in state and federal laws.

Washington state will allow a citizen with a prescription to own a 60-day supply of marijuana, but America will imprison that very same patient for years, regardless of doctor approval if a federal employee were to discover this possession.

So, not only are harmless recreational offenders being unjustly punished, but people with legitimate medical backing for their usage also suffer from this marijuana prohibition. delic with short-lasting, beneficial physical and mental properties. Whether smoked or ingested, marijuana causes euphoria, sleepiness, hunger, and general feelings of comfort and well-being.

Ill effects? Certainly. But, they are akin to smoking cigarettes, which our government has deemed lawful and acceptable, and consuming alcohol, yet another legal drug. It seems that the gravest of ramifications for smoking marijuana are the legal consquences that our government has hypocritically imposed.

Think about the other drugs and pharmaceuticalsthat our government allows. For example, Oxycontin is an extremely addictive prescription medication that offers harrowing dependence and withdrawal for the user. Even right-wing superpower Rush Limbaugh couldn’t “just say no” when it came to legal opiates, and he was forced into a rehabilitation clinic as a result. Pot does not have this addictive property, and when it comes to quitting, one can expect no physical withdrawal whatsoever.

Why would our government allow an evil such as prescription opiates to plague people’s lives while men and women are persecuted and prosecuted for smoking a harmless plant in the safety of their own homes, causing no injury to anyone? Apparently,
for some unreasonable reason, the moral majority and power-players in our lives began to see mind-altering substances as an unacceptable pastime, and a war has been declared against the drug culture as a result.

The War on Drugs is based on the illusoryconcept of a drug-free society. The fault in this thinking is that never in the historyof our species has there been such a society.

Drugs are, were, and will always be a prevalent part of the human experience, so the goal of eradicating their use through fines and incarceration is absurd. Persecution
of drug users has not stopped the rising tide of usage. It has merely forced drugs into the dark underbelly of the illicit-trade market, which causes infinitely more harm than good to the people of the world.

Now, just as in the alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s, instead of being regulated by the government, crime-lords and killers are in control of the drug industry. Today, the business of bud is shrouded by maliciousintent and criminal action, and the products on the streets, consequently, are seldom clean and safe. However, people continue to use drugs and continue to profit from their manufacture and distribution. The government has accomplished nothing except the forfeiting of any internal control over the industry it may have had, and the sole beneficiary of this foolish and dangerousoversight is organized crime.

No one is a stronger advocate for the prohibition than the drug kingpins who are making obscene amounts of money as a resultof their unique willingness to provide consumers with these illicit substances. After all, legalization would only serve to sever drug-profits to these syndicates. Yet, our government continues to naïvely facilitatethe conditions that allow crime to thrive.

If our government were to legalize marijuanaand assume control of its cultivation and distribution, society would benefit in many ways. For starters, organized crime would be crippled because no one would choose to purchase a legal substance from these shady characters when it could just as easily be obtained from trustworthy Uncle Sam. Also, the prison and court systems would be relieved of the burden of innumerablenon-violent drug offenders, which would alleviate billions of taxpayers’ dollarsspent on housing these inmates.

But what’s to be done about children gaining access to marijuana? Certainly it’s not moral to allow minors to use psychedelicsubstances. I believe this is correct, just as minors are not permitted to possess alcohol or tobacco. Under the discretion of legal distributors, marijuana would not be nearly as available to children as it is now in the hands of criminal salesmenwho don’t give age a second thought and simply want to make fast cash. The youth of our nation would be safer and placed further from the reach of drugs as a result of marijuana’s legalization.

To win the War on Drugs, we must arm ourselves with an arsenalof information concerning marijuana, and we must remain intelligent in our arguments. The disparaging of law enforcement, denial of inherent health risks, and continued drug-addled stupiditywill not benefit anyone but those who seek to oppress marijuanausers.

The only reasonable pursuit in regards to our government’s negative stance on marijuana is control and regulation of the drugs that pervade our society. Until then, nothing will be achieved but the willful oppression of our nationsown people.

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