I have never smoked Marijuana. In fact, when I don’t particularly like the smell and it bothers me when I have to deal with people smoking pot near me particularly at concerts.  I am not telling you this to prove how moral I am or that I don’t have any vices. Lord knows that I have sinned many times in my life and have many vices. I merely let you know the above facts about me in order to show that my next statement does not come via some personal self interest but via what I believe is the greater good for society as a whole. Marijuana should be legalized in Massachusetts.

            According to the CDC over a quarter of the population of the United States has used Marijuana. Furthermore, more high school seniors report using Marijuana in the last 30 days than report smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol. [1] Thus, could possibly conclude that the fact that Marijuana is illegal is not preventing anyone who wants to obtain it from getting it. Furthermore, one might speculate that the fact that Marijuana is illegal and thus has the possibility of arrest and legal punishment attached to it has not done that much in the way of stopping people from using it. While it is true the vast majority of people who use Marijuana are most likely not arrested for it, the number of Marijuana arrests has increased every year for over 30 years and the numbers since 1980 have doubled. From the FBI Uniform Crime Report released in 2007, over 872 thousand people where arrested for Marijuana possession in that year compared to about 400 hundred thousand arrest in 1980. So in the statistics the number of arrests keeps going up as does the percent of usage. Part of this may be due to increase in population, but the population of the country has not increased at the rate of Marijuana arrests. Since the goal of making something illegal and too punish someone for it is theoretically to stop that behavior, one can see that the policy of being tougher on Marijuana users is failing to curb usage.

            Some might say that Marijuana is harmful and that why we should not legalize it. While it is hard to argue that Marijuana is not harmful, one could make the argument that Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol in many ways. That amount of Marijuana that one would need to consume in order to have a lethal overdose according to many researches is about a third of ones body weight which explains why lethal overdoses do not happen. [2] A National Vital Statistics Report showed that over 19,000 people died because of Alcohol overdose in 1999. [3]  The biggest reason we for our legalization of alcohol and illegalization of marijuana may be more have to do with stereotypes and culturally history than any statistics that show Marijuana is more dangerous than Alcohol or that our drug laws decrease the use of Marijuana.

            We once tried to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol during the prohibition era. All that did was create a huge black market. Have we not done the same with the illegalization of Marijuana? To put it another way, would you rather someone buy Marijuana from a CVS where it would be regulated and heavily taxed in order to fund drug treatment programs or would you rather have people buying Marijuana in the black market underground economy where they are more likely to enticed to buy other drugs or deal with unsavory characters or organized crime?