Who Are You To Judge

5 Pages 1185 Words

Who are you to judge?
When I was in seventh grade, I went to Cascade Jr. High School, which is right next to Evergreen High School. One day my friend Jessica and I decided to walk over to Evergreen and try to find her sister who was a junior at the time. On our way, we ran into some cute boys who started talking to us. They were cute and we were “impressionable young girls” the next thing we knew we were smoking a strange cigarette and passing it around the circle. When we discovered we were smoking weed, it made the high even more exciting. Only the cool kids were brave enough to do an illegal drug and suddenly we felt cool. We had sat through all the D.A.R.E. classes and other lectures about the evils of drugs but none of that stuff worked for us. Marijuana should be legalized because the efforts to make it illegal are doomed to failure.
Marijuana is a flowering bud off a bush, which grows naturally. People not make it in a chem. Lab; it does not contain rat poison or deadly substances. What is so wrong with law-abiding citizens occasionally smoking? Who is the government to judge what consenting adults put into their own bodies? The war on drugs is a waste of taxpayer’s money. According to Steven Duke, the United States spends 50 billion or more dollars on the prohibition of drugs (Para. 10).
Despite all the money spent on the war on drugs it is not working; marijuana and other drugs are easily available to consumers including young children. I know from my own experiences that it is easier for minors to acquire marijuana then it is legal substances such as tobacco and alcohol. According to Cynthia Rowe 14, million people have admitted to using an illegal drug and almost ten percent of children twelve to seventeen have used an illegal drug in the past thirty days (Para. 1). Elizabeth Hovde asserts that half of all high school seniors in the U.S. have tried illegal drugs (Para. 1-10). These numbers alone prov...