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What Is Medical Marijuana?

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In 1969, when Richard Nixon was president, he was looking for a way to consolidate existing federal drug control laws into one powerful federal statute to better control what many felt was a growing problem, which was the rapid increase of drugs (Haerens & Zott 19). By 1970, they produced the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, and it finally went into effect on May 1, 1971. This act divided substances into categories based on their medical use and potential for addiction; marijuana was classified as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning that it is labeled as carrying a high potential for abuse, without currently accepted medical use in the United States, and/or lacking accepted safe use even with medical supervision (Gillard 15). Since …show more content…

In short, medical marijuana is just marijuana being used for medical purposes. However, Heather Griffiths, who has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Delaware and has worked as a survey administrator at the university’s Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies, defines medical marijuana as “…the medically controlled use of marijuana or tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) by patients seeking a means to address medical problems including nausea, vomiting, weight loss, multiple sclerosis, asthma, inflammation, glaucoma, poor appetite, spasticity, chronic pain, and acute pain” (Griffiths 11). The one question that has circled the globe is, should medical marijuana be legalized? Right now, medical marijuana is legal in 28 states out of the 50 states. However, I believe medical marijuana should be legal in all 50 states because it helps with multiple medical conditions. Although there are people who oppose this idea because of their differing opinions, there are more people who are for …show more content…

I will give 2 examples of opposing arguments, and then give my rebuttal to their argument. One of the first examples is that opposers of legalizing medical marijuana try to argue that marijuana is much more harmful than alcohol. These opposers main argument is simply that, “Compared to alcohol, marijuana is not safe” (Stimson 25). Alcohol is different from marijuana in many ways and opposers use these ways to argue their point. Marijuana is known to be more likely to cause addiction for an individual, be consumed to the point of intoxication, have no known general healthful properties, and is toxic/deleterious to an individual’s health (Stimson 28). Alcohol can also be seen as having fewer health risks when it comes to long-term consumption and it seems that it actually offers some health benefits. However, long term consumption of marijuana has an effect on the T-cells in our lungs and impairs short-term memory along with other things, and has toxic properties, which can lead to birth defects, pain, respiratory system damage, brain damage, and stroke (Stimson 29). Although this makes legalizing medical marijuana sound like a bad idea, there is an argument for

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