Drugs

I love drugs. I do drugs all the time; drugs help me focus in class and also help me with my anxiety. I legally smoke cannabis to help with my anxiety. When I was a junior in high school my anxiety was at an all-time high and kept me from going to prom, hanging out with friends, going to events, and also kept me from getting my license. I tried everything to stop my anxiety including anxiety medication, therapy, and even meditation and that was until I started using cannabis. It only took a few times but once I started, my anxiety vanished in days and I was actually able to be a human being and do things.

Cannabis grows naturally here on Earth. The name Marijuana was actually used to demonize the plant by giving it a big scary name. I see cannabis as more of a medicine than a social drug but medicine aside it does make a pretty awesome social drug. Smoking cannabis can help with muscle spasms, slows the progression of Alzheimer's disease and get this, stops cancer from spreading (cancer cell structures). Tommy Chong, who is best known for smoking weed and staring in the movie Up In Smoke, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Upon hearing the news, he denied chemo and only used cannabis to treat his cancer. Today, he is free of cancer at 79 years of age.

Marijuana is a better drug than alcohol, fact. Now, if you're at an event and someone's really violent, obnoxious, and angry, are they drunk or high? They're drunk. I don't understand how someone can be pro-alcohol but anti-weed. Yes, weed can be abused but cannabis abuse is a lot healthier than alcohol abuse. The biggest push I've seen for keeping cannabis illegal is that if it's legal, people will drive while high. Well, guess what buster, people will drive drunk and it's A LOT more dangerous than driving high. If you're stoned behind the wheel, the worst you will do is drive at a high speed of 3 mph, where if you're drunk driving you have a high chance of either killing yourself or an innocent bystander. Counting deaths per year from the substances alone, alcohol kills about 88,000 people a year where Tobacco is up to about 480,000 deaths per year where marijuana kills absolutely NO ONE.

Marijuana is illegal because of economics; marijuana can do what most prescription $300 pills can do and it would seriously hurt the pharmaceutical company if people really started to see its potential. Around 1850 people started seeing the potential of this plant; hemp would be used for not just smoking but turned into a fiber and had great industrial use but it was just hard to process. Once processed, hemp fiber became so popular people would refer to hemp as the billion dollar crop and everyone was going to use it for paper and textiles and fun fact: the declaration of independence was even printed from hemp fibers.

William Randolph Hertz, who owned an industrial fiber industry and head of a newspaper, saw hemp as a threat to his business and fought against hemp by printing stories in his paper about some new drug called marijuana. Now the term marijuana was used to describe a Mexican wild tobacco and went on to say that people were smoking it and that this drug is the reason Mexicans rape so Congress saw this and outlawed the drug, not knowing at the same time they were outlawing hemp when hemp has been being used for thousands and thousands of years. Cannabis propaganda was out of control at this point with the film Reefer Madness which depicts people smoking weed and murdering each other and killing themselves by jumping out of windows and this was all just to get people to think there's something wrong with the plant. This was totally economic.

Today weed is responsible for half the drug arrests and despite the fact that black and white people smoke it the same rate, black people are FOUR TIMES as likely to get arrested for marijuana. Marijuana isn't dangerous but we're still following racist old laws and throwing countless people of color in prison for having possession of a fucking plant. Marijuana is a schedule one drug along with cocaine and heroin, which only proves my point of how uneducated people are about this drug.