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Unlawful or Unconstitutional?
Ron Kappy
“I love orgasms when I’m stoned. They’re better, they last longer, and they’re just more intense. I think it’s easier for me to come when I’m high,” says Amanda, a twenty-six year old sales person from New York City.
Another New Yorker, Karen, is an assistant editor of a small publishing company. She claims that marijuana helps her to write, making her more creative and insightful. “Getting high,” also helps her to relax after a long days work (Malone 1990).
Whatever the reason, more and more people, like Karen and Amanda, are
searching out their local dealer and lighting up, by themselves, with friends
and sometimes even with family.
NORML
(National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) estimates the number of
regular users in the United States today at over fifty million people (Gettman
1989)! This is an astonishing figure that raises some serious questions about
the current laws governing the sale and possession of marijuana. The time has
come to discard the dogma of our forefathers, and the commercialized brain
washing seen on television, and take a serious and objective look at the
marijuana problem. A look, that is, at the decriminalization of marijuana. This
does not mean the total acceptance and legalization of the drug.
Decriminalization suggests more of a partial prohibition, or a meeting place
between the two extremes that would benefit everyone in society from the regular
user to the entire criminal justice system to the non-user. John Gettman (1989)
sums it up best in saying ‘the folly of total prohibition is that it pursues
unachievable objectives through previously failed policies’. In other words,
the marijuana prohibition working just about as poorly as the prohibition of
alcohol (which was repealed over time).
NORML’s
plan for decriminalizing marijuana would include the following features:
-Those who
are old enough to go to the liquor store and purchase alcohol would also be
allowed to plant their own marijuana crop (for personal use only).
-Individual
states would set up a commercial market for the drug, just as is done now with
the sale of alcohol (i.e. patrons of questionable age would be required to
present ID in order to purchase marijuana).
-The Federal
Government would create the guidelines by which marijuana was sold and
advertised (if at all). Tax dollars from the sale of marijuana could be directed
towards the problems of alcohol and drug rehabilitation (mostly cocaine and
heroine addicts) (Gettman 1989). The benefits to decriminalization don’t stop
there. Many thousands of jobs would be created, and many more materials could be
derived from the hemp plant that would benefit society; certain oils, clothing
and paper just to name a few. Aside from all the benefits that have been
discussed so far, there are also many legitimate question and oppositions to
decriminalization that deserve to be addressed. First and foremost of these is
health.
Clearly,
smoking marijuana can not be a healthy habit no matter how you look at it;
however the advantages of decriminalization could far outweigh the
disadvantages. Just exactly how bad is marijuana? A countless number of studies
have been done in order to answer this question, and many of these studies are
the reason ‘Prohibition II’ still exists today.
Initially,
scientists and researchers found many disasterous effects that marijuana smoke
can have on the human body such as dramatic increase of pulse and blood
pressure, permanent brain damage, increased risk of cancer and psychological
addiction, just to name a few. More recent and in-depth studies have found that
many of the dangers that were thought to exist are actually just old disproven
theories that stuck to scare the public into an anti marijuana posture.
For example,
Vincent P. Dole and Herman Joseph (included in the New York State Journal of
Medicine) conducted an experiment in which they subjected rhesus monkeys to an
amount of marijuana equal to one hundred joints per day, over a six month span
(an amount much greater than even the avid pot smoker can consume.) Not
surprisingly, two of the monkeys died from lung complications, but researchers
observed no permanent brain damage in the remaining animals (Street 1983).
Another man who did extensive research on how marijuana effects human health was
Dr.Lester Grinspoon MD (associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School).
His results,
next time….
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