Carson Hulak

English Composition 1101 3pm

Dr. Courtney Ferriter

November 6, 2019

My article, “A Public Health Framework for Legalized Retail Marijuana Based on the

U.S. Experience: Avoiding a New Tabaco Industry” is written by two authors, Rachel Ann Barry

and Stanton Gluntz. This Article is on the ever so controversial topic of legalization of

marijuana. They dive deep into many aspects of legalization, such as for medicinal purposes,

only certain forms being legalized and recreational use as well. Their intended audience for this

article is a mix of students, given that Gluntz is a professor and Barry is still very involved at her

university and also to those invlo

They drive home the point that the marijuana industry should not be regulated like that of the

alcohol and tabaco industry, for fear of mass capitalization and large-scale marketing of

marijuana products, promoting its use among all legal ages. Their proposed “fix” for this, is by

using the public health framework, like they do with alcohol and tabaco, this basically means the

health department would implement policies to protect users and non-users by regulating

manufacturing, advertising, and distribution of all marijuana products, all in all they want to

prioritize public health over industry profit. Overall, this article holds up to all the standards of

being credible, with facts given for just about every detail they touch on, to the 55 cited

examples they use from a variety of different sources, makes this article very credible.
 Now let’s talk about the credibility of the two authors, Rachel Ann Barry and Stanton

Gluntz and their article. To start off, the article itself is funded by the National Cancer Institute

but the article claims that the sponsorship had no say on the research or analysis used in this

article, so no red flags there. The authors themselves also declared to have no conflicting interest

on the topic. This article is also peer-reviewed and was published on September 27, 2016, which

given that only small changes in legalization of the marijuana industry have changed over the

past 2 years still keeps this article within relevance. Now let’s talk about the authors, Rachel Ann

Barry, from 2013-2016 she was at the University of California, San Francisco and received her

degree in Political science and after that she was a graduate student at the University of

Edinburgh, she got her degree in International Public Health Policy, and currently she is still at

the University of Edinburgh, working on her Doctorate degree in social policy. She has also

published 10 other articles on the topic of the marijuana, tabaco and alcohol industries and she is

currently working on a large project to analysis the legalization of marijuana in Uruguay. On top

of all this, she was also a consultant for Cannabis legalization and regulation in Canada. Now,

we talk about the other author, Stanton Gluntz. Stanton is an American author, professor and

tabaco control activist. He has published 9 books, 4 of which are on the topic of the tabaco and

drug industry. He is also a professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University

of California, San Francisco, his researches focus on the health effects of smoking tabaco and the

policies that regulate the industry. He is also co-leader of the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer

Center Tabaco Program. Stanton was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005, He has also

received 5 rewards and honors from the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association

and 2 others. Given all this, both authors clearly have long lists of qualifications on the topic they

are discussing, giving more than enough credibility to their article than is needed.
 Source credibility of an article is huge in determining whether the information presented

is accurate or not, their use of credible sources throughout the article is vast and definitely meets

the needs required. They have 55 different citation sources listed that they used in this article,

with most of their references being from the year 2012 to current. From the 55 citations that are

listed about ¾ of them have links to the article and from that about 90% of the article links work,

still with how many citations listed, there are plenty of credible sources to be drawn from.

Given how credible all the sources the authors use are and the authors credibility alone, it

shouldn’t be of much surprise that their appeal to proper use of logic is very much so present in

the article. This article is very fact driven, the topic of legalizing marijuana and thoughts on how

to regulate the industry, bring with it the need for a handful of quality sources to cite that

information from. A good example of this would be, “A public health framework would avoid

regulatory complexity that favors corporations with financial resources to hire lawyers and

lobbyists to create and manipulate weak or unenforceable policies” (Richter KP). This is there

major driving point of the article, and they don’t fall short of logical explanations to back it up,

there use of logical fallacies is basically non-existent, they kept there article down to factual

evidence and left most of their emotional reasoning out of it. The substantial amount of logical

reasoning in this article, makes it that much more credible.

I have read many articles on this topic, because not only is it a very relevant topic in

today’s society but it is also very interesting to read both sides of the argument. Whether I agree

with what they say in this article or not is irrelevant, but I can say this is the only one I have read

so far that is not filled with loads of emotion and logical fallacies. Unlike all the other ones, this

article has a great number of properly sourced references to back up all their points on marijuana

legalization. The authors both have outstanding credentials, with Rachel Ann Barry basically
devoting her whole career to that area of study and Stanton Gluntz being a very well-known

author and professor on cardiology and the tabaco industry. All in all, this article checks off all

the boxes, it is clear that this is a very credible article.

Citations:

1. Richter KP, Levy S (2014) Big Marijuana—Lessons from Big Tobacco. New England

Journal of Medicine 371: 399–401. pmid:24918955

2. Barry RA, Glantz S (2016) A Public Health Framework for Legalized Retail Marijuana

Based on the US Experience: Avoiding a New Tobacco Industry. PLoS Med 13(9):

e1002131. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002131

3. “Stanton Glantz * UCSF Profiles.” UCSF Profiles,

https://profiles.ucsf.edu/stanton.glantz.

4. “Rachel A Barry: University of Edinburgh.” Academia.edu,

https://edinburgh.academia.edu/RachelBarry/CurriculumVitae.