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Marijuana is known as a mild psychoactive drug, and it contains more than 400 chemicals. Themain psychoactive substance in marijuana is THC; tetrahydrocannabinol. Marijuana has severaleffects on the human body, and most on the brain. It acts primarily upon thecentral nervoussystemwhere it alters brainfunction, resulting in temporary changes inperception, mood, consciousnessandbehaviour . Studies performed at the University of Cambridge show a decrease in consciousness; you are not as aware and awake as you would be without. The study, oftenreferred to as the “the Rama study”, because of scientist Ramachandrans discovery of theCapgras syndrome, also showed some patients becoming extremely paranoid and some evenexperiencing the Capgras syndrome; they believe their loved ones have been replaced byimposters. Individuals using marijuana have some common symptoms. They often feel light-headed, hunger, dry mouth. It has been described as “a feel-good bomb”. In a study performed inGermany in 1987, show deficits in the user’s short time memory.Let’s talk about memory. Memory is what makes us human. It provides our sense of identity,allows us to recognize the people we love, and to develop skills and learn about the world.Without memory, we’d be stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of endless re-enactment. Memoryinvolves all the information picked up by the ways of knowing; emotion, perception, reason andlanguage. –Memory is all about recognition. If I see a Starbucks cup, I think Tazo Chai Latte’s,Chapters, friends, fun, and so on. This is all because of memory. Remember we had thoseconversations about that table and whether it really was a table or not..? That is also based on your memory. If someone tells you, that is a table, you will remember that, andto you, that will be a table forever. So, if marijuana messes with your memory, it should
not
be legalized. –But does it really affect your memory that much? If so, according to Canadian law, whyis it not allowed as a type of defence under intoxication when having committed a crime?Alcohol is on the list, and we all know that if you drink too much, you might wake up thenext morning with a serious hang-over and no memory of what happened last night. –Also, can’t loss of memory be a good thing sometimes? What if you have been through areally tough time, e.g. been raped or something awful like that, and you experiencenightmares and paranoia? Wouldn’t marijuana be a good way to erase that memory?So, if marijuana is legalized, we risk more and more people’s memories. And this might lead to people causing the society to run slower, due to bad short time memory. People might notrecognize well known thing, causing issues at e.g. work, school, etc.And that is also an argument, made by the anti-marijuana part of the population. “It slows societydown”. –Well, let’s take a look at the stats: 64% of all Canadians have tried marijuana during their life. Is our society running slow? No, it is not. Our society is working perfectly fine, andif anyone is slowing society down, it is the people being put in jail for marijuana crimes.
 
They have no way of getting a proper job afterwards, and that might lead to new crimes being committed due to lack of opportunities. – 
But 
we got to take some factors into consideration;#1) not all of the people who have tried marijuana are still using it daily, meaningthe stats are manipulated to favour the pro side, because they are not mentioningthis...#2) if not put in jail/ punished for something that actually
is
illegal, how is thesociety gonna work? There would be people committing crimes everywhere, because they would know they could use the marijuana and getting out of the punishment.This leads to a new issue; the un-controlled production of marijuana. By not legalizing it the U.S.government loses almost 14 billion dollars in tax every year if marijuana was to be taxed thesame way as alcohol. This money could have been used to catch the people who are illegallyimporting marijuana. Also, if the growing is controlled, the government would know whatamount of THC that is in the marijuana, and they would not have to worry about too highconcentrations leading to e.g. extremely bad judgement, etc.But, even though they would be able to control it, there would still be illegal substances, and theillegal substances would be harder to find because it is legalized, so they cannot be punished for having it/using it. This will also make the detection of other drugs harder, as a lot of drug teststest for several kind of drugs, especially marijuana, since it is so common, this means you caneasily blame using marijuana if you e.g. really were doing cocaine. Even though the substancesare different, they will both appear on the same test, and the only way of finding out if it ismarijuana or not is a blood test. And this is gonna cost A LOT of money to do blood tests on allsuspects. So, the taxes and the costs to provide proper testing will probably even out.Let’s talk about the some of the controversial science behind marijuana use...Science is biased information. No matter what you do, some science will always be biased. Ascientist would not spend years researching something he/she thought to be impossible. They aretrying to prove something by researching it. This means that every little sign of evidencesupporting their thesis will be well documented, and made a bigger fuss about than if somethingdisproving the thesis was to happen. This does not go for 
all 
scientists, but it is very common.Another example of a knowledge problem is misinterpretations of the science. If read that“smoking marijuana gives you cancer”, I would assume it was the marijuana causing the cancer,not the smoking, which is really the truth. This is another way of portraying marijuana as a badthing. So, let me give you another example...Who here, in this room, has ever heard the saying “marijuana kills brain cells”? This was the #1argument for marijuana prohibition in the early 70’s. Ronald Reagan, the president of the UnitedStates at this time, made scientists perform an experiment involving monkeys smoking weed.The moneys, who were between 10-12 kg, were pumped full of marijuana – about 30 joints a day – for 30 days, and the result was that most of the monkeys died after 90 days. After a few weeksonly, it was revealed that the
real 
experiment involved pumping at least 83 joints filled with thestrongest Colombian marijuana they could find. And since they used a machine (a pump) to dothis, the monkeys were suffocated. They didn’t die from an overdose of marijuana; they diedfrom lack of oxygen. And after their death, when they compared the brain cells of the non-users
 
to the users, of course; they found that the users had less brain cells. And the reason why?Because they died from lack of oxygen, and guess what? Lack of oxygen kills brain cells.So why is it that people still believe in this statement? Because we made it knowledge by makingit a justified true belief; the government justified it by their brain cell count, and we believed it.Altogether, science didn’t lie; the politicians did. And that brings us over to a new area of knowing;
HUMAN SCIENCES.
So, why are these politicians so against marijuana legalization? In the movie, the union, themayor of Vancouver said “prohibition has never worked”, but is he right? In 1957, the year  before it became prohibited, it estimated that there were 50 000 marijuana users. Now, in year 2009, the estimate number is 50 million users. But there are some issues to this information...#1) can we trust this estimation? It is performed by computers, artificial intelligence, and basedonly on the amount of marijuana produced on an international level. What about the amount being destroyed?#2) the population grew, so really, the percentage growth is not the same, so the legalizationorganizations are also manipulating the information to their advantage.Another argument against marijuana legalization is that there are more kids in clinics for marijuana addiction than any other substance (since cigarette-addiction does not count...). This is because the DEA and the judges in cases concerning marijuana, offers either “treatment of marijuana addiction” or jail. Even though you don’t show any sign of use, and if the tests werenegative, this would still be the offer. No wonder the numbers are so high then... but then again,almost 20% of them are in there for serious addiction. This is strange, because marijuanacontains no substances that encourage physical addiction. This means the addiction is purely psychological, which can be solved by being treated with... marijuana. So is this an evil circle of drug abuse? Should psychological issues be solved by the use of mind altering drugs? Whatabout our consciousness? Will we be awake and aware enough to be able to make the samedecisions as before? Probably not... and this might lead to accidents, e.g if driving high.Talking about this brings us over to another argument; marijuana and driving. If your consciousness is affected, then should you be driving? No. But that does not seem to stop certain people. In fact, in Western Europe, almost 1.5% of all car accidents are due to the driver beingunder the impact of marijuana. What about the rest of the cases concerning impaired driving?40.8% is due to alcohol. –So how come alcohol is legal and marijuana is not? The argument was “marijuana iseasier to abuse”. Well, let’s talk about abuse. If I jump of a bridge, should bridges be prohibited? I did abuse it. Or if I decide to poke my eye with a fork, should forks be banned? If I eat too much cheese burgers, should they be made illegal? NO! This is not agood argument, guys... –So let’s compare marijuana to some legal substances. Alcohol kills 40 000 Americans ayear. Cigarettes kills 440 000 Americans per year. Guess what..? That is more than all thedeaths caused by AIDS, heroin, car accidents, crack, alcohol, fire, murders and cocaineTOGETHER! Marijuana has never caused a death. To die from marijuana you mustsmoke 30 regular sized joints in less than 20 minutes. Yeah right, I challenge you! And
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