After writing this essay in order to pass Higher English, I decided it might make a decent writeup. Reposted here after my too hastily created Legalization of Cannabis node was (rightly) zapped.

Legalization of Cannabis

Cannabis is a variety of the hemp plant (cannabis sativa) found naturally in India. It can also be grown in other warm climates; or indeed, with enough care and attention, it can be grown indoors almost anywhere. The plant itself has many uses: the hemp seed can be eaten to provide a highly nutritious source of protein; the stalk of the plant can be woven in to cloth, or pulped and turned into paper; and, of course, the flowers, buds, and leaves of the cannabis plant (known as marijuana) are often smoked, mainly due to their psycho-active effects. In this country (the UK), along with many others, the possession of cannabis is illegal, but people have been campaigning for the decriminalization of cannabis for some time now and recently there has been a lot of public debate about the legalization of cannabis.

Marijuana/cannabis has thousands of possible uses as a medicine – before the United States criminalized marijuana in 1937 cannabis extract was legally available there as a medicine. It is a very powerful medicine, and smoking marijuana can help people suffering from AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, epilepsy, depression, asthma, severe pain and many other problems. By using cannabis to produce other medicines, even more illnesses could be cured or treated. However, current laws prevent even purely medicinal uses of cannabis, and there are often stories in newspapers about people who have been arrested for growing their own cannabis to treat a long-term illness from which they suffer.

Moreover, the legalisation of cannabis would allow it to be regulated by the government, making it even safer. An age limit could be set, allowing people who are old enough to understand all the issues involved to make their own choice, just like alcohol and other legal drugs. It would also mean that supplies of cannabis could be properly controlled to ensure that it is not ‘cut’ with anything, such as harder drugs.

Yet, two drugs used legally by a large number of people are alcohol and nicotine. Every year, these drugs kill thousands of people. However, no death has ever been directly linked to marijuana, although some people have obviously died whilst ‘high’. One study attempted to show that a large number of people killed in road traffic accidents were under the influence of marijuana. This study, like many similar studies, was flawed, however, as it failed to take into consideration which driver was responsible for the accident, or if the driver was also under the influence of alcohol.

Even assuming you manage to ignore all the reasons for legalising cannabis – which is something that a lot of politicians seem to be very good at – there is still the fact that making it illegal simply doesn’t work. The USA has some of the harshest cannabis possession laws in the world, yet they also have one of the highest drug abuse rates. Imprisoning people for possession of cannabis is also overloading their prison system – at any one time, almost 1 in every 200 Americans is in jail. In this country, Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, recently made a controversial speech where she stated that if the Conservative party was elected, they would have a zero tolerance policy on cannabis possession. Even police chiefs said that Widdecombe’s plan was unfeasible, not least because of the huge burden it would place on police officers.

There are many arguments against the legalisation of cannabis, but most of them are myths, or propaganda created by governments. Lots of people believe that cannabis leads people to harder drugs, such as heroin or cocaine. However, the Dutch partially legalised cannabis in the 1970s, and since then there has been a substantial decline in the use of heroin and cocaine. If marijuana was really a ‘gateway’ drug, more people using it should have resulted in more people using harder drugs, so something is obviously wrong with that theory. It is also commonly believed that marijuana is more dangerous than tobacco. In fact, tests have proven tobacco is just as dangerous as an equal amount of marijuana when smoked, and the nicotine in tobacco is highly addictive whilst THC (Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol – the active drug contained in marijuana smoke) is less addictive than caffeine. This means tobacco smokers are likely to smoke much more tobacco than a marijuana smoker would smoke marijuana, making tobacco more harmful in the long-term. Also, there are other ways to use cannabis that allow you to avoid inhaling the majority of the cancer-causing particles, while still getting the full effect of the THC.

On the other hand, I do accept there are a few valid reasons against smoking marijuana, one of which is that the medical effects are not yet fully understood, and there is some unverified evidence that smoking marijuana in adolescence can cause ‘amotivational syndrome’, making the smoker unmotivated and less willing to work. But, these effects have never been proven as yet, and are thought to be only short term.

In conclusion, I think that cannabis is less harmful than many other drugs, which are currently legally used by almost everyone; and more positively it also has many medicinal values. In any case, even if it is harmful, it should be up to the individual whether or not they choose to smoke cannabis – the only person who could be harmed by smoking cannabis is the person who uses it, so why is it illegal? People are capable of weighing up the arguments and then making an informed decision on their own, without the government prohibiting it for everyone.

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