Medical Marijuana Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Medical Marijuana - Research Paper Example It was marred with political motives and manipulations. Not all facts were presented. The long-proven therapeutic use of marijuana was not made known to the public. Rather, it was consciously and systematically put aside by emphasizing and worse exaggerating the harmful effects of marijuana. In short, marijuana was demonized driven by political and economic reasons. Since then, the criminalization of drug abuse has become not only legally but also morally right and the war on drugs has become not only a civic but also a moral duty. As a consequence, small drug offenders filled correctional facilities, causing not only human rights abuses in and outside corrections but also causing the Federal State coffer to bleed unnecessarily; urban violence between drug users/pushers and law enforcers heightened, entailing greater police visibility, capability, and sophistication which means bigger budget allocation for efficient law enforcement; and drug operations went underground, not only making law enforcement more difficult but also denying the government millions of potential taxes while enriching drug cartels and crooked law enforcers and legislators. Other than this, the criminalization of marijuana has also deprived patients of a potent alternative medicine that could be less expensive than those being produced by profit-oriented pharmaceutical com panies. Within this context, this paper argues for the legalization of medical marijuana because it is more economically beneficial than it is socially costly. Marijuana is a Spanish-American term originally used to refer specifically to tobacco, but was used later in South and North America to refer generally to cannabis (Iversen 26). This reference change must have been due to the fact that marijuana comes from the Cannabis or hemp plant, named scientifically as Cannabis sativa in 1735 by the well-known Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, making it an officially classified species (5). Marijuana was