~ Reasons to Legalize ~

Drug war sends billions of dollars overseas and into the hands of dealers, not to mention the billions wasted on inprisoning drug users and on the DEA. The supposed drug war is VERY costly to the U.S. government and only makes the goods of dealers more valuable. The government could legalize weed and tax it as they do tobacco and alcohol and turn it into a huge profit. With this several billion dollar gain they could lower taxes or do a number of things. Do you know that making marajuana illegal only creates an enormous profit for those who illegally smuggle and deal them in our country. If it were legalized and taxed, the amount of money that the US would make would be absolutely obscene. The estimates for drug smuggling totals eight percent of world trade, at least several billion dollars of that could be added to releave taxes or whatever the government sees fit. This is not to mention the amount of money wasted in trials and on jails to hold people who were found with marijuana. I am not saying marijuana is a drug with no consequences, but I believe it to be far less dangerous than already legal drugs such as alcohol which have a higher level of impairment during intoxication and a higher level of probability for addiction. Alcohol dramatically increases agressive tendancies and results in many fights, car accidents, and deaths due to overconsumption each year. The amount of deaths each year caused by alcohol and cigarettes is one thousand times the amount of deaths due to other drugs, yet they remain legal and marijuana does not. If you were to read non biased studies by the American Medical Association you would see that the addictive potential of marijuana is very low, mostly commonly causing addiction only in people with psychological disorders. In addition the passive high which marijuana induces which does not lead to crime or violence as can be said about alcohol, and there is minimal damage done to the body by smoking marijuana, with the exception of the damage of smoke entering the lungs (cigarettes also damage lungs), which many smokers avoid by smoking through a water filtering device such as a bong. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/addictiv.htm -a fabulous page, this tells it all

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