The legalization of Marijuana Essays (869 words) - Drug Control Law

In the documentary The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, Adam Scorgie argues about the international effects of marijuana and how the citizens of the world benefit from it?s use. Scorgie compares how societies operate today with marijuana being illegal, to how the world would react to the legalization of marijuana. He uses logical and emotional arguments, logos and pathos, along with interviews of both average people and people who have a higher level of education to prove that marijuana helps economies as well as a societies. He also presents facts that the use of marijuana does not have a negative impact on the user?s mentality and behavior. Scorgie uses logos to show how the ?Union? positively benefits a community economically. In the documentary, Scorgie talks about places called Grow Ups. Grow Ups are where pot can be grown inside of a house and/or a shed. In every Grow Up community, each member has their own assigned job that they do to make daily operation run smoothly. Realtors sell homes to growers, carpenters shape the homes for the growers? convenience, and electricians install the specifically bright lights necessary for the operation and divert the energy elsewhere so that the power use is not suspicious. Even though the realtors, carpenters, and electricians are crooked, the police are still upholding their duties to catch growers and finding these Grow Ups. This shows that the Grow Ups allow for the ability everyone to have a job and a steady income to support families and themselves, if needed. It helps us realize even though it is illegal, this process involves so many people. This also puts marijuana at a higher demand since it is illegal. Scorgie also looks at the argument of marijuana causing violence. He makes it clear that it is because of the prohibition of marijuana. If one cannot sell pot and they are caught selling it, they are considered a criminal. When in reality, this person is selling something that is natural and it has not caused any deaths. Then my question to you, is why is it legal for tobacco companies to sell cigarettes when nicotine and tobacco have caused four hundred thousand deaths a year? Most people do not know that marijuana was legal at one time and that it was an agricultural crop used for many purposes; none of these purposes have ever been harmful to societies in any way. As Scorgie describes this subject, he goes on to argue that marijuana is not exactly the drug that most people make it out to be. He uses a lot of pathos to persuade his audience that marijuana does not cause lung cancer or damage brain cells by interviewing medical examiners and researchers. There was a doctor who had performed an experiment on monkeys to prove that the drug can kill brain cells and cause malfunctions. In this experiment, the doctor put masks over the monkeys? nose and mouth and pumped the amount of thirty joints into the monkeys? system. The doctor had failed to mention that he was limiting the monkeys? oxygen amount which entailed to suffocating them. This experiment shows how the dishonesty of one doctor can sway a person?s opinion to agree that marijuana cannot cause somet hing as drastic as killing brain cells or lung cancer. The leading cause deaths in the United States are drugs that do not contain marijuana but are tobacco, crack, and heroin along with aids and murder. Studies have shown that tobacco has killed up to four hundred thousand people a year and caffeine can kill up to ten thousand people a year. Marijuana is nowhere near the top in leading causes since there has never been a case where it was the cause of someone?s death. When taking these facts into consideration, it makes this argument easy to trust. Scorgie goes on to argue that marijuana is not something that can hugely harm our society and he also questions whether or not prohibition is necessary. Even after the prohibition, the demand or supply for marijuana has not changed. It is a steady source for income for organized crime. When using the underground market causes violence, eighty-eight percent of marijuana arrests are for