Monday, December 15, 2014

Speech final: Max Kaufman

Legalization                                                                                          Max Kaufman
                Marijuana must be made illegal. A vicious plant, marijuana is the first step towards modern day enslavement. Marijuana addicts suffer from boughs of violence, insanity, murder, and even suicide. This soul destroying menace deeply rooted in hell, causes wild derangement and eventually a horrible death. What kind of world would we be creating for our children if we allowed this satanic plant to remain legal?
 [Long pause]
          Now that I’ve caught your attention, most of you are aware that this is not the case, if you weren’t aware of this that is perfectly fine. The true but hard to stomach truth about Cannabis is that the most common side effects are red eyes, a dry mouth, dizziness, and the urge to consume various foods including but not limited to pop tarts, Oreos, chips and or dip of any kind, cereal, and ice cream (especially when in sandwich form). Needless to say obesity rates would not be helped if marijuana were to be legalized. I propose that the United States should legalize medical marijuana and it should be viewed by the nation as a medicinal product.
          Switching to a historical note, let me start by saying that people did not always believe that marijuana was bad. In fact its use has been traced all the way back to 7,000b.c. It is just within the 20th century that marijuana has been made to be a bad thing.
A man named Harry J. Anslinger back in the 30’s saw the federal bureau of narcotics as a wonderful career opportunity. As an ambitious man he realized he could create a problem along a solution. So he latched onto the idea of marijuana. Attributing it to causing white women to seek sexual relations with other races, and other ridiculous things without any facts to back him up, Anslinger was quite obviously manipulating the American public. He did this with a film called “Reefer Madness” to which much of my argument against legalization was taken from. When you get a chance google this guy, some of stuff that he said is pretty funny now.
          Anslinger along with several other racists and exploiting businessmen are responsible for the negative stigma that follows marijuana.
          Now, with the constant struggle against awful disease it seems ridiculous that we still cling to these stigmas, when it could be a viable treatment for such illness. A discussion on youtube between Piers Morgan and Dr Sanjay Gupta addresses the medical viability of this plant. Here you can see, first hand, as medical marijuana cures a patient of chronic painful spasms of the diaphragm almost instantly, a feat that proved incapable of many strong and damaging drugs with side affect lists 10 times as long as the one I listed before. 
          Now you some might say that legalization will only result with more widespread use in children and teens. But in the American Journal of Public Health it is said by two PhD researchers that recent studies related to legalization in states like Colorado have given us no reason to believe that marijuana use in teens has gone up.
It might be shocking that more than 1 in 3 adults have tried marijuana but I believe that the removal of common misconceptions about cannabis could lead to less teens trying it out in the first place.
But for those who choose to use marijuana to treat chronic back pain or induce a hunger previously stolen from them by chemotherapy, who is Anslinger to tell them they can’t.
Lastly marijuana sales if made legal could become a huge source of wealth. It was estimated by Huffington Post that legal marijuana sales in 2014 would become a 2.14 billion dollar market; growing even faster than the competitive Smartphone market, imagine only if sale was permitted nationwide.

Overall cannabis has the potential to provide many health benefits, with very few negative side effects, and it was previously made illegal for reasons not factually backed up at all. It is for these reasons that I propose the United States legalize marijuana.

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