Legalization Of Marijuana

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of marijuana illegal, it did make it expensive and inconvenient. In 1942, marijuana was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia because it was believed to be a harmful and addictive drug that caused psychoses, mental deterioration, and violent behavior.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a sharp increase in marijuana use among adolescents and young adults. “The current legal status of marijuana was established in 1970 with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act, which divided drugs into five schedules and placed marijuana in Schedule I, the category for drugs with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.”(Lykestos, 2) In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Legislation (NORML), an organization that supports decriminalization of marijuana, unsuccessfully petitioned the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. NORML argued that marijuana is therapeutic in numerous serious ailments, less toxic, and in many cases more effective than conventional medicines. Thus, for 25 years the medical marijuana movement has been closely linked with the marijuana decriminalization movement, which has colored the debate.
Since NORML's petition in 1972, there have been a variety of legal decisions concerning marijuana. “From 1973 to 1978, 11 states adopted statutes that decriminalized use of marijuana, although most all of them re-criminalized marijuana use in the 1980s and 1990s.”(Joy,17)
Now that we have gone over a brief history of marijuana in the US we can get to the matter at hand. The most widely accepted argument for the legalization of marijuana is the medical use argument.
Pain is the most common symptom for which patients seek medical assistance. According to the authors of Medical Marijuana “All of the currently available analgesic (pain-relieving) drugs have limited efficacy for some types of pain. Some are limited by dose-rel...