Marijuana Reform Research Paper

Because marijuana is illegal in the United States and decades of government sponsored anti-marijuana programs, it’s often associated with crime though there is no association between weed use and crime. Although there are studies that link marijuana and crime, its almost all focused on illegal distribution. People who are high don’t commit violence. Its common knowledge that a person should never take alcohol or weed and drive, but although its true that marijuana affects the ability to drive, it is not as dangerous as drunk or buzz driving. A recent study show that marijuana use increases the odds of a fatal crash by 83 percent while driving with a blood alcohol level of at least .05 increased the chance of being in a crash by 575 percent. It is clear that the roads are threatened more by alcohol than weed but society is also affected by both in very different ways. Colorado is a state where weed is legal to those twenty one and older and offers a look on marijuana’s effects on society such as states with medical marijuana painkiller overdoses deaths have dropped 25 percent due to people substituting their prescriptions for weed (Christensen, Wilson "Is Marijuana as Safe as -- or Safer than -- Alcohol?”). Alcohol does not lower the number of painkiller but because

This paper will look at the benefits and drawbacks to legalizing marijuana by looking in at Colorado.The state made forty million dollars by taxed marijuana in 2014 alone, also Colorado saved countless millions because of the extremely lower amounts of marijuana arrest and court cases. It is not clear how having new recreational marijuana stores opening will affect the cannabis market, or businesses expanding around them. Gov. John Hickenlooper says that the economy is thriving with record setting numbers of tourists (73.1 million). 49 percent of those tourist said that legal marijuana influenced their decisions to vacation in Colorado. The ER’s in Colorado have also seen a rise in numbers of marijuana related cases and those cases in non-residents have almost doubled. An unexpected situation that arose from legal cannabis was the amount of electricity that is being use to grow the drug. Some cannabusinesses have to go green with solar or wind power. There are many varying views on the effects of legal marijuana have developed in Colorado since marijuana became legal in 2014.

Marijuana has been proven to be safer than alcohol, yet marijuana is against the law. Alcohol is known to contribute to acts of violence and crime, while in most cases cannabis can reduce aggression in its users. “In last year’s cases of reported violent crime three million offenders had been drinking. Almost all cases of date rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence had some kind of connection to alcohol” (Medical Fact: Marijuana is Safer Than Alcohol, 2009). Marijuana has not been linked or has

For many years in the past, marijuana has been made to look like a dangerous drug, linked to crime and addiction. In the early 1920s and ‘30s most people still did not know what marijuana was or had even heard of it yet. Those who had heard of it were largely uninformed. The drug rarely appeared in the media, but when it did it was linked to crime and even thought to be murder-inducing. A 1929 article in the Denver Post reported a Mexican-American man who murdered his stepdaughter was a marijuana addict (Baird 2011). Articles such as this began to form a long-standing link between marijuana and crime in the public’s mind. Soon, laws against marijuana began coming into place. In 1970, Congress classified

For the sake of building off the previous entry, I would like to incorporate a couple of marijuana related legal statistics from Steven Nelson’s article Police Made One Marijuana Arrest Every 42 Seconds in 2012. The Federal Bureau of Investigation released data on the crime figures for drug-related crimes in 2012 and it showed that a staggering 749,825 people were arrested for marijuana related offenses; that is one arrest every 42 seconds. It also accounted for 48.3 percent of all drug arrests. Even with the recent upsurge in public support for the liberation of the drug policy, police arrested the same number of people in 2012 on pot-related charges as they did in 2011. These numbers have led many people to begin forming advocacy groups geared to decriminalize the drug. Dan Riffle, the director of

The Author in this article is discussing the alarming truth that more people have been arrested for small amounts of marijuana this year compared to those who have committed serious violent crimes last year. The author also argues that an excessive number of African Americans have been arrested for marijuana use similar to whites but are prosecuted far more frequently.

Five states have implemented way to minimize the amount of crime while people are still able to use. Even though the states have made this determination though a vote. The Federal government still sees it as a felony crime. Within the reform strict policies have been set in place. Should marijuana be decriminalized or legalized? Should there be restrictions based on age. There was an analysis done that compared five states that implemented major marijuana reforms. Evaluating their effectiveness in reducing marijuana arrests and their impact on various health and safety outcomes. The two types of reforms that were evaluated: all-ages decriminalization in the states of California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The other reform was 21-and – older legalization in Colorado and Washington. From the analysis out of the five states all five state experienced substantial declines in marijuana possession arrests. There were four states with available data that also showed unexpected drops in marijuana felony arrests. All- ages decriminalization more effectively reduced marijuana arrest and associated harms for people of all ages, particularly young people. The decriminalization in California has not resulted in harmful consequences for teenagers, such as increased crime, drug overdose, driving under the influence, or school drop outs. California teenagers showed improvement in all

Since 2012, four states in the US have allowed sale of cannabis for recreational use by adults over the age of 21. (Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington State). Washington State legalized growing of cannabis for personal use and legalized it for gifting to friends. In 2016, more states are considering legalization and within the next 4-5 years, half of the state will at least most likely to have proposed a bill talking about decriminalization or even legalization. In the paper it discusses the probable effects that will come with legalization and also the possible effects, along it also talks about the legalization of cannabis and how it affects the use of alcohol, tobacco and opioids, which can tend to be a lot more dangerous that cannabis. Study Method. This report aimed to briefly describe the regulatory regimes so far implemented; outline their plausible effects on cannabis use and cannabis-related harm; and suggest what research is needed to evaluate the public health impact of these policy changes. It reviewed the drug policy literature to identify: (1) plausible effects of legalizing adult recreational use on cannabis price and availability; (2) factors that may increase or limit these effects; (3) pointers from studies of the effects of legalizing medical cannabis use; and (4) indicators of cannabis use and cannabis-related harm that can be monitored to assess the effects of these policy changes. Study Findings. Legalization of recreational use will

These negative effects of marijuana being illegal at the recreational level can be fixed. There are solutions and benefits to these problems. The first and most important thing the state will have to do in order to legalize recreational cannabis is decriminalize the drug. If marijuana was decriminalized in the state of Minnesota, crime rates and arrest would decrease. According to Christopher Ingraham, a writer for the Washington Post said, “In Colorado, marijuana arrests fell by nearly half from 2012 to 2014. Marijuana possession charges in Washington state fell by a more dramatic 98 percent between 2012 and 2013. Alaska, Oregon, and D.C. show similar declines.” Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and D.C. saw major benefits when they decided to make marijuana legal for recreational use. If Minnesota decriminalized marijuana, not as many people would be in jail, which would help with the over crowdedness in prisons in the state. Colorado alone has compiled several research studies demonstrating that legalization has not promoted an increase in violent crimes. According to research conducted by the Drug Policy Alliance “During the first year of the implementation of Amendment 64, Denver experienced a 2.2 percent decrease in violent crime rates and an 8.9 percent reduction in property crime offenses” (Heuberger). Decriminalizing cannabis will help our police department focus on more violent and heavy drug-related crimes. This evidence provides proof that legalizing recreational

Cannabis sativa or Marijuana as is commonly known worldwide is a hard drug with adverse side effects to the users. With this reason it is an illegal drug in a majority of parts in the world. However according to research statistics, with this illegality there is still a high rise of both users as well as those initiated into the practice annually with the United Nations placing it first among the illicit substances widely used in the world (UNODC 198). Having worked previously in a number of facilities for juvenile delinquency and correction in California I observed and participated in the numerous ways, methods and tactics employed by the government to reduce the use of cannabis sativa with little success. Instead, the number of crimes

Why would the residents of the United States vote to allow a killer to legally roam the streets? Why would the people of this great nation allow another poison to be offered to the general public? The past of the U.S. has not served it well in deciding the fate of the future of its generations. There are already two killers running rampant on the streets of this great nation. Tobacco and alcohol kill millions of people each year. They destroy the lives of families by spreading cancer, alcoholism, liver disease, addiction and abuse. We have tried to control these two dangerous infections in our past with prohibition and laws to limit the sales to adults. These attempts to curb the destructive nature of these two substances have all but been thrown to the way side by our society. Now alcohol and tobacco have not only infected every generation since their freedom; the U.S. will be living with their destruction for generations to come. This begs the question, Why should the U.S. allow marijuana, a third poison, to be legal for recreational use? Although it does seem to help in the medical field, such as pain relief and seizure medication, that does not give this generation the right to allow citizens to legally buy it from every local convenience store. This research paper will show that marijuana is dangerous to this nation’s youth, a gateway drug to hardcore drug use, and laws that will help to protect the future generations will be discarded like the laws of the past. These

The launching of the 1960’s brought with it a public health issue concerning the use and abuse of illegal drugs. Responding to the crisis, the US department of Justice established the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous drugs, which was designed to control illegal drugs, specifically marijuana. Building on the prohibition, in 1971 President Richard Nixon officially declared a “war on drugs”, which resulted in an increased federal role in the warfare by providing the federal government with power to institute new mandatory sentencing laws. New policies, including the passing of the Controlled Substances act, which, “superseded earlier legislation and classified cannabis as having a high potential for abuse, having zero medical use, and being unsafe for use without medical supervision,” (Barry, 2014) produced a dramatic rise in national incarceration rates, disproportionally representing those people of color. In fact, according to the FBI, in 2011 there were 750,000 marijuana arrests (the vast for majority) alone.

Shortly after, Miron starts reffering to and talking about the state of Colorado, which in 2012 became the first state to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Miron states, “Since commercialization of medical marijuana in 2009, and since legalization in 2012, marijuana use, crime, traffic accidents, education and health outcomes have all followed their pre-existing trends rather than increasing or decreasing after policy liberalized” (Miron 1). Expressing this fact in his article is very crucial to Miron’s argument, because one of the big issues some people fear when talking about legalizing marijuana is that things like crime and traffic accidents will increase, but this fact proves them wrong. Shortly following this point he changes his perspective a little, in an attempt to further prove his argument.

This article provided information in reference to how legalizing marijuana has affected the crime rate in Colorado. Again, this article only tells the positive statistics however

Over the last few decades, the controversy over marijuana has been heightened, specifically in the last decade or so, with the legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana for parts of the United States. Now with increasing acceptance and with its counterpart scrutiny, research is being implemented to analyze whether the benefits truly outweigh the possible health effects to individuals and communities. In this article, researchers study public files from the state of Colorado and Denver metropolitan area from 2001 to 2013 to support a possible theory of connection between diminishing public health and legalization of medical marijuana. Some of the public files in use are arrest files that have limits to yearly data, and hospital and poison control records that are documented monthly. Specifically in this article, the years before legalization of medicinal marijuana in 2009 are compared to the years after in which an increase or decrease in hospital visits or reports of marijuana-related incidents are compared. The researchers in this study attempt to show an increase in harmful effects on the overall public health in communities in correlation to the significant increase of accessibility of marijuana throughout the state.