Up In Smoke: Legalizing Marijuana

Grass. Weed. Cannabis. Ganja. You can visualize what I’m going to be talking about at this point. Growing up, your parents instilled in you all the negatives associated with the drug, but do the negative aspects of legalizing marijuana really outweigh the positives?
Numerous studies have documented the negatives of getting high off of weed. Scientists claim that aside from marijuana’s weak association with depression and anxiety, it can cause brain deterioration of ‘critical life skills’ over time.
The same study further finds that marijuana users impair their ability to memorize and organize information, ultimately functioning at a ‘reduced intellectual level.’ Funny, since half of the people I meet hourly already function on a ‘reduced intellectual level,’ and they don’t even smoke marijuana.
More recently, research has made an aim to focus on the positives of the drug. The use of medical marijuana to treat chronic pain sufferers has helped these people live nearly pain-free lives, even after they tried numerous other treatments in an attempt to control their pain.
Other arguments against marijuana include ‘dangerous’ behavior, such as driving under the influence or being ‘boring’ as the life-like marijuana commercials out there portray various situations. In other words, the advertisements tend to stretch the truth just a little bit.
How about the one where a group of guys smoking weed in their car in the fast-food drive-thru lane run over a little girl on a bike? Private organizations like these invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on commercials like these that depict such incidents that rarely ever happen.
Needless to say, similar arguments could be made about alcohol