Legalize Marijuana

More people are killed because of alcohol than marijuana and yet alcohol is legal and marijuana isn't. That doesn't make sense to me. People who drink alcohol have a greater chance of going out and doing harm to themselves or someone else. People who smoke marijuana would rather stay at home and eat. That doesn't seem very terrible to me. This world would be a much safer place if marijuana was legal.

Did you know that many patients suffering with HIV/AIDS, glaucoma, cancer and chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and other debilitating illnesses find that marijuana provides relief from their symptoms? Marijuana's medical applications include:
-Relief from nausea and appetite loss;
-Reduction of intraocular (within the eye) pressure;
-Reduction of muscle spasms;
-Relief from chronic pain

Physicians often find that marijuana is able to provide relief for symptoms and illnesses when prescription medicines fail to do so.

Our failed marijuana laws cost taxpayers $7.7 billion a year, keep police from focusing on real crimes, and fail to keep marijuana away from minor. It's time for a new approach--strict regulation and control--to reduce the criminal market and lower teen use.

Marijuana use is far higher in the United States than in the Netherlands, where marijuana is sold in regulated establishments instead of on the criminal market. In the U.S., 40% of people over 12 have tried marijuana--versus 17% in the Netherlands.

Drug dealers don't card for age. If marijuana were taxed and regulated, licensed establishments would have an incentive to card for age, because selling to minors would cause the establishments to lose their licenses to sell to adults.

In 2003, there were a record 755,186 marijuana arrests in the U.S.--greater than the number of arrests for all violent crimes combined.

Taxing and regulating marijuana would:
-Make our communities safer. Removing marijuana from the criminal market would free up police time so police officers can focus on violent crimes, property crimes, and people who drive under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, or any other substance. Tax dollars would be used to incarcerate real criminals who threaten public safety.

-Reduce teen marijuana use. Unlike drug dealers, licensed vendors would ensure that teens could not purchase marijuana... just as states that have implemented strict controls on underage tobacco purchases have seen sales of tobacco to minors fall dramatically.

-Save taxpayer dollars and generate revenue. Each year, the government spends $7.7 billion to arrest and lock up nonviolent marijuana users. Taxing marijuana would generate millions in tax revenues instead of profits for drug dealers.

-Provide a legal source of marijuana for seriously ill patients who currently must resort to buying marijuana from drug dealers.



What regulation would NOT do:
- It would not allow marijuana possession or access for those under the age of 21.

- It would not allow driving under the influence of marijuana, which would remain a crime and would be treated like other DUI offenses.


Marijuana arrests are at an all-time high of 755,186 a year--which is one arrest every 42 seconds. That's more arrests for marijuana than for all violent crimes combined. And 88% of those arrests are for simple possession, not sale or manufacture.

Unlike alcohol (which I think should be made illegal) and tobacco, no one has ever died from using marijuana. And while marijuana isn't risk-free, it's risks are lower than those of many legal drugs.

Alcohol can cause strokes, can cause death from overdose, and the number of deaths annually is 100,000. Tobacco can cause strokes and while overdose cannot cause death, the number of tobacco-related deaths annually is 440,000. Marijuana cannot cause strokes, cannot cause death from overdose, and the number of marijuana-related deaths annually is 0! So why is the safest one illegal?



What are the four biggest reasons that people are concerned about regulating marijuana?

1. "Marijuana use is wrong." Whatever one's moral beliefs abut marijuana consumption, marijuana laws have caused far more harm than marijuana use itself: marijuana prohibition drained precious criminal justice resources from our communities, made it difficult to keep marijuana from our children, and destroyed the lives and families of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

2. "Marijuana regulation would send the wrong message to teenagers." Regulation would reduce teen access to marijuana by taking it off the streets and regulating it, and sending adults to prison if they sell marijuana to young people According to the White House, more than half of U.S. teens try marijuana before graduating from high school. In the Netherlands, where marijuana is sold in indoor establishments to adults who are carded for age, teen marijuana use is only 28%.

3. "Marijuana regulation might increase DUI-related deaths on the roadways." Driving while intoxicated would still be illegal. And people who want to use marijuana are already using it; there are few adults who would start using marijuana if it were regulated.

4. "Marijuana is a 'gateway' or 'stepping stone' to hard drugs." It's the criminalization of marijuana that's the gateway to hard drugs. When adults enter a liquor store to buy alcohol, they don't find cocaine sitting on a shelf next to the bottles of vodka; similarly, if marijuana were regulated, adults who buy marijuana would not be exposed to hard drugs (as they currently are, via drug dealers).



Marijuana is the largest cash crop in the U.S., with retail sales that exceed that of corn and all vegetables combined. Making criminals out of millions of marijuana growers, distributors, and consumers has been a disastrous policy.

Plus, a 2007 report estimated that prohibition costs $41.8 billion per year by adding law enforcement costs and depriving governments of the revenue that could be gained by taxing marijuana sales.

Nearly 100 million adults in the United States have tried marijuana at least once, and 15 million use it at least monthly. Despite marijuana's widespread use, marijuana users are being arrested at an alarming rate. In 2006, nearly 830,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges--an all-time high in the country's history. And 89% of those were for possession, not manufacture or distribution. That's one arrest every 38 seconds.

Seventy-two percent of American adults believe that marijuana users should not be jailed--and a whopping 80% support legal access to medical marijuana for seriously ill patients. It's time to end marijuana prohibition.

A record of 7,000,000 people--or one in every 32 American adults--are now behind bars, on probation, or on parole. What's more, in the past 10 years, drug offenders have accounted for 49% of the growth in the total federal prison population.

What that means is that the steady increase in the prison population is fueled by harsh sentences for nonviolent drug offenses--sentences that are harsher than for many violent crimes.

Take the case of 25-year-old Weldon Angelos, who in November 2004 was sentenced to a mandatory 55 years in prison for selling three eight-ounce bags of marijuana to an undercover informant. The sentencing judge called the penalty "unjust, cruel, and even irrational," but the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2006 let the sentence stand without comment. As Angelos' attorneys pointed out, the sentence he is serving is harsher than the sentence for raping a child--or the sentence for detonating a bomb aboard an aircraft.

And some victims of the government's war on marijuana users aren't even involved with marijuana, like Accelyne Williams, a 75-year-old reverend who died of cardiac arrest after a SWAT team conducted a "no knock" raid on his Boston apartment. The police battered down his door, chased him around the apartment, tackled him to the floor, and cuffed his hands behind his back. No drugs were found.

You'll find more horror stores like this at http://www.mpp.org/victims -- and these are just a few examples of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are detained, beaten, harassed, tortured, arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, and/or killed each year in the name of marijuana prohibition.

All information in this petition was taken from http://www.mpp.org via internet and brochures as well as from personal experience.