Marijuana – The Movement towards Legalization !

Nearly one hundred years ago the idea of prohibition made its way into the minds of people all across the world. Alcohol was always considered bad and various governments saw it as a catalyst in the decay of society and put a strict ban its consumption and sale. Fast forward to the present day and you can see liquor and beer being advertised on just about any television station and on billboards in the most prestigious of cities. If alcohol is as hurtful to us as our great grandparents made us believe then it certainly has taken its time over the last several thousand years since civilization first drank the juices of fermented fruit.

These days we are dealing with a similar kind of prohibition which comes in the way of cannabis criminalization. Similar to the bootleggers of the early 20^th century, drug smugglers and dealers get jailed at an alarming rate. The result of this was filling of prisons and police officers occupying themselves with drug crimes while more dangerous criminals go unnoticed. All the while funding for all of this comes from the pockets of people who are largely unaffected. These are the same people who turn on the news and read news articles about others being killed in a war on drugs. A war started to keep our streets clean and free of drugs.

While there are drugs that are harmful, it seems as if most of the focus of all of this drug activity is on marijuana. It is a drug that is stereo-typically thought of as a way for people to kick back and relax really worth all the blood and money that get wasted to keep it out of people’s hands? With more governments deciding against the ban of marijuana we are seeing it come up as a topic of interest more often.

In places like California where marijuana is easily obtainable and legal there are no major increases in crime rates, which if marijuana were as dangerous as we believe, taking place. It seems as if more people are beginning to decide that perhaps marijuana isn’t as harmful to us as we have always believed and over the years as they see others making their purchases of medicinal marijuana and going about their lives just like any other person would after purchasing any other kind of legal drug.

With these changes slowly taking place it makes one wonder if some day we will be looking back on the great effort put into keeping marijuana out of people’s hands in the same way we now look back on the ban of alcohol. When our grandchildren are grown will they be looking back on the history of cannabis criminalization and wonder why we wasted so much of our resources on keeping a something like marijuana illegal when there were so many larger problems in the world?