Legalize It?

When approaching the problem of illegal drugs, we decided to explore the unusual route of legalization. Recently there has been a ballot initiative in one of our states to legalize marijuana for all purposes, currently fourteen states in our country have medical marijuana legal and available for prescription use. The policy of legalizing medical marijuana and legalizing marijuana for other uses could discourage and reduce the amount of people who use illicit drugs. The reason for this is that while currently some have described pot as a gateway drug, the removal of the social and legal stigmas could discourage the leap to more harmful drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Another side effect of this would be the removal of the profit to gangs and drug operations who commit other crimes,the government could supply import and export and also tax the results providing much needed capital in these times. In fact the ban on pot started with a Victorian like moral stigma similar to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. When this ban was repealed less then 20 years later, it proved that when the government attempts to regulate morality it fails and the consequences of such bans are often worse than what they were originally put into place to prevent.

By: Mitchell Black, Cody Hicks, Teytey Trumph