Another Perspective
The Kids Are Alwrong
Legalizing marijuana would be bad for the children.
In Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Samuel L. Jackson comes home to find Bridget Fonda lying on the couch, smoking dope, and giggling at the TV. Disgusted, he tells her that marijuana will rob her of her ambitions.
“Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV,” she replies.
It’s fashionable among conservative and libertarian journalists, such as the editors of National Review and Reason magazines, to demand the decriminalization or legalization of drugs, especially of marijuana.
Many weighty arguments have been mobilized in support of this cause. Yet this movement has only made fitful progress in the quarter of a century since the first generation of American voters to have much first-hand experience with marijuana began to have children themselves. Parents now understand that additional marijuana use would exacerbate many of the unhealthy and unfulfilling trends already at work in our society.
The problem with marijuana is not that it’s some wild and crazy thing, but that it’s middle-age-in-a-bong. Smoking dope saps the energy from youth, turning them into sedentary couch potatoes.
The parents of America already have a hard enough time getting their teenagers — and, increasingly, their adult children who have come back home to live — off the TV room floor when they are perfectly straight. Parents understand that changing laws to make marijuana more readily available — and, let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what these “reforms” would do — would create an even more inert and obese generation of young people.
Smoking dope may not do all that many of the horrible things often attributed to it, but it definitely makes people want to sit down. And that’s something even the most clean and sober young people of the 21st Century do way too much of already.
Whenever parents get together, the talk eventually turns to how Kids These Days — including perfectly adjusted ones — never want to go outside. Sunshine is their enemy. Everything they desire most in life — 100 channels, video games, instant messaging — comes to them on a screen, best viewed in a darkened room.
MARIJUANA ALSO MAKES PEOPLE easily amused. In an electronic age, where an unlimited supply of entertainment is instantly available around the clock, that’s not a good thing. It’s hard enough to for young people to decide that they shouldn’t spend another twenty minutes flipping through the cable TV dial once again on the assumption that — while all the programs the last six times around were lame — something cool has got to have come on in the meantime. Add THC to their brain chemistry and they’re headed for an infinite loop.
Eventually, marijuana-augmented TV addiction becomes a very real threat to getting anything done in life. The last thing parents want is for their children is for them to wind up like that perpetually baked stoner The Dude (“or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”) played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.
It’s not just technology’s fault. The way middle class parents now raise their kids can incline them toward passivity, which the availability of marijuana can horribly aggravate.
Another reason kids don’t go outside anymore is because leaving the house has become an enormous production number. When I had a baseball game as a kid, I merely grabbed my glove and walked or biked to the park. No trouble.
My son’s adolescent teammates, in contrast, never arrive for their league games in anything less massive than a Ford Explorer, because the crime rate is too scary for their parents to let them walk and the traffic too dense for them to pedal. Further, they have to lug not only a duffel bag full of baseball impedimenta, but at least one, and preferably, both parents, lest they grow up to write self-pitying screenplays about how nobody ever came to watch them play.
Not surprisingly, the concept of spontaneously heading over to the park between scheduled games to see who wants to play some ball seems to modern suburban boys to be as outdated and unfeasible an idea for having fun as tipping cows.
Growing up in a world where every activity is carefully scheduled by parents means fewer youths are self-starters. They don’t expect to initiate activity. They take the same attitude toward free time as do soldiers in a hurry-up-and-wait Army: unless somebody in command is yelling at them to do something, they don’t do anything. They just flop down and try to amuse themselves in the mean time. More marijuana would only make this already inactive lifestyle worse.
Not surprisingly, young Americans have gotten fatter and fatter as the proliferation of remote controls means they don’t even have to walk across the room anymore to turn up the stereo. Believe me: the munchies aren’t going to make that problem any better.
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BR| 12.4.09 @ 10:12PM
Your statements are very weak and it looks like you have not researched the marijuana topic at all. Here are reasons why marijuana should be legal:
(1) Hemp (stalks, stems, roots) from marijuana plants used to be a huge source of biofuel for your car. It was also made as paper, wood, and clothes. That was until the Marijuana Tax Act 1937 which put too high of a tax on hemp products. The act was enacted mostly because powerful big wood/paper, clothes, and fuel businesses were getting upset because they were losing a lot of money due to hemp's success. If America goes back to proccessing hemp, natural resources wouldn't be so stressed (e.g. trees that are diminishing). And we would go back to using hemp ethanol to power our cars, which will dramatically reduce emissions because biofuels burn cleaner and don't have metals or sulfurs.
(2) Economy: With production of hemp becoming legal again, there will be a great amount of textiles and paper/wood factories emerging, which will create roughly around 500,000 or more jobs created. We need all the jobs we can get while being in this recession. Plus, with legalization of cannabis, the government can regulate it and create laws to prevent kids from getting it. Also, the government would be able to get some profit from the sells by taxing. That would create an income of more than $36 billion(this is calculated with hemp production profit too), and America will be out of debt within 2 years or so.
(3) Prohibition: Obviously the government doesn't ever learn from their mistakes. Remember the alcohol Prohibition Act? The government had to repeal that act not too long after they enforced it. The same with now. Prohibiting marijuana creates crime, not diminishes it. Look at it this way: if the government doesn't regulate it, then the gangs and citizens will. (For example: You don't see Miller Lite holding guns and killing people. You know why? Because beer is legal). Since marijuana isn't legal, there are many violent gangs from Mexico and Columbia smuggling weed into the US. And many violent crimes are caused from drug disputes or money disputes related to drugs. America is basically paying large violent gangs to do what they are doing now: killing and bringing in harder drugs(coke, heroin).
(4) Wasting money: About every 38 seconds a person is arrested for possession of cannabis. That's about 1/3 of all the jails reserved for moslty non-violent marijuana smokers. Many of which are productive members of society with no criminal background. This ends up wasting $7.5 billion dollars a year....just for people who didn't do anything except possession of weed. There are many complaints locally and federaly of no room in jails to prosecute real offenders such as murderers, rapists, sexual offenders, and other violent crimes. Many of them are walking free while peaceful cannabis smokers are stuck in jail. I don't think anybody would see violent offenders walking as beneficial.
(5) Choice: Now you said that people make stupid choices all the time. Yes they sometimes do, but people have the right to make those choices. That's what America was supposed to be based on: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America was founded as a democracy that states that a person can do whatever they like as long as it doesn't interfere with the neighbor's life. So, we're supposed to have the legal right to do whatever we want to our own bodies. I'm against hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, but I'm not going to interfere with someone who does. Everybody has the right to ruin their mind and bodies with alcohol, prescription medicine, over-the-counter medicine, and cigarettes. So why not marijuana? Marijuana is safer.
(6) Cannabis: Yes weed has mild psychotropic effects, but recent and very thorough studies have been conducted that show that marijuana's effects do not kill brain cells. Also weed is not addictive like you or the media says. Many studies have been done on this issue. Addicitve drugs either raise or lower the levels of dopamine in the brain. Weed does neither. There's also the saying of cannabis being the "gateway" drug. That is far from the truth. About 26 million Americans smoke weed and many of them stay with it. The reason the media and yourself say it's the gateway drug is because you both see many hard drug addicts smoke weed too. Actually many hard drug addicts use weed to calm their down when the hard drug is wearing off. They started with the coke or herion in their life and discovered that weed can help them avoid that bad effects of the drugs they love. Not the other way around. Also, you say people are lazy when they smoke weed. That is true concerning kids and teenagers (that's one reason why there should be a minimum age to buy weed). But you didn't look at the rest of the studies. Yes teenagers and kids get lazy when they smoke, but adults actually become more active. You can see in places like Jamaica and Eastern countries that farmers would smoke cannabis while harvesting and planting 100s of acres of crops because they worked harder and longer when high. You also talk about car accidents. Car accidents while a driver's high is rare to not at all. The car accidents that happen are almost always when the driver's drunk.
And here's something to think about:
When America was first settled, there was a LAW that REQUIRED every person to GROW MARIJUANA.
Oh...and...
The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
There's your facts. Next time you want to make an argument, be a good boy and do your homework.