Obama Paper

President Obama,
I have read many of your policies and the things you plan on changing, but one sticks out to me in particular. It is the legalization of marijuana. I know you are currently opposed to legalizing it, but you do want to de-criminalize it which I think that would be better than doing nothing.
I know that many people say that pot should only be legal for medical reasons, but I ask myself, “why?” I feel that it is nice for people who need it for medical reasons but it still isn’t bad for people who just smoke for fun. In reality marijuana is “better” for people than alcohol is. A lot of times, alcohol just causes people to do stupid things that could hurt them or someone around them. Although pot and alcohol are both equally dangerous when consumed and then being behind the wheel of a car, but statistics have shown that alcohol related car crashes and deaths occur more often than marijuana related car crashes.
I’m not saying that marijuana is not a bad thing at all; marijuana has some very bad effects as well. I have to factor in the people who are very opposed to this idea and I have to incorporate the bad things as well, as to not be completely one-sided. Marijuana does alter peoples’ thought process which could cause them to do something harmful. Marijuana doesn’t just make you feel good for a while; it can also hurt the relationships with the people around you that you love. Marijuana can become an addiction to where people would do anything to get their hands on it, even if that meant hurting their family.
Now, the second half of the opposing sides’ argument could be avoided if marijuana was legalized. The fact that some people would do almost anything to get some pot would not be as big of a problem if it were legal and you could get it easier. That I feel is a very compelling argument.
As a kid growing up I always heard people talking about alcohol and the fact that when you are underage it is more fun to drink because u have the chance of getting caught, so that makes it sneaky and makes it more thrilling. When you turn 21, its obviously still fun, but less people do it as much because it has lost most of the excitingness to it because people don’t have to hide it when they are 21. I think that if marijuana were to get legalized, at first there would be a big frenzy of people that would be smoking all the time, but after a while it would get old and less people would do it, because half the thrill of doing it now is because it is illegal. Some of that thrill would disappear. You also have to consider the fact that some people still wouldn’t smoke even if it was legal.
Some people in America are so opposed to marijuana that it wouldn’t matter if it was legal or not, they would still never try it. So, we won’t have to worry so much about a ton of people going crazy and smoking pot if it were legal. For the most part it’s just going to be people who already do it a lot. I know personally some people who only smoke occasionally, not all the time, and they have said that if marijuana was legal they probably wouldn’t start smoking a whole lot more.
In conclusion, I hope that some of the points I have made will persuade you to think that marijuana is not all the bad and it should be legalized. I realize that there are many people who are opposed to it, but it really comes down to whose side of the argument is more convincing and reasonable.