Tina Armour | Staff Writer
armourtv@imail.losrios.edu
The legalization of marijuana for recreational use in California is not the answer to our problems.
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has proposed that the California government “remove all penalties in California law on cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession, or use of marijuana, natural THC, or paraphernalia for persons over the age of 21.”
Ammiano’s bill will allow a drug that alters a person’s state of consciousness to be readily available to all adults who want it.
Marijuana is a drug which alters the actions of its users, making it potentially dangerous. Law enforcement arrests users who drive while under the influence of marijuana, just as they do with alcohol, because judgment and perceptions are affected by its use.
According to the Department of Mental Health Division of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, “studies of marijuana’s mental effects show that the drug can impair or reduce short-term memory, alter sense of time, and reduce ability to do things which require concentration, swift reactions, and coordination, such as driving a car or operating machinery.”
The medical uses for the drug and its ability to relieve pain are potent and should be controlled as they are now. As with medications like Oxycontin or Vicodin, which also affect a user’s state of mind, marijuana should only be administered legally and under a doctor’s prescription.
Taxing the drug would briefly help California’s economic crisis by adding $1 billion a year to the state’s income, but the loss of functioning adults and students in the workplace would handicap us more than the lack of finances has. The effects of marijuana on productive Californians could even recreate the same sort of financial collapse.
Legalization would also affect schools, as the drug would become legally available to college students and the bill offers no control of its use.
“Young people who smoke marijuana heavily over long periods of time can become dull, slow moving, and inattentive,” according to the DMHDDAA.
I know I would not want to be in a classroom with a teacher or multiple students that have been smoking marijuana – would you?
California needs to consider the fact that a quick buck isn’t worth what could potentially be thousands of lives lost to drugs.
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Good arguments!
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This article is poorly researched, poorly written, misinformed, and full of holes. I intend to address this more completely in a letter to the editor, but there was one point made that I found particularly stupid, and it’s this:
“I know I would not want to be in a classroom with a teacher or multiple students that have been smoking marijuana – would you?”
Are you serious? Because you are. Every single day. What, are you 12, or something?
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