Marijuana is a dry, shredded green and brown mix of leaves, flowers, stems, and seeds from the hemp plant Cannabis sativa. Marijuana smoke has a pungent and distinctive smell often compared to that of a skunk. It can be found in multiple forms such as oils and waxes. The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Marijuana is the most common illegal drug. The use of this drug by young people has been on the rise since 2007. Do too the overwhelmingly blatant use of this drug the negative side effects are hardly taken into consideration. More teenagers are now current smokers of marijuana than of cigarettes, according to annual survey data. The current argument in this country is whether this drug should be legal for medical and or recreational use. Personally I believe that neither are an acceptable reason to ingest such a drug. The oldest record of medicinal use of marijuana comes from Chinese texts, around 5000 years ago. Its exact origins are still unknown but most experts hypothesize that it originated from somewhere in Central Asia, north of the Himalayan Mountains. The Latin term cannabis had a Greek origin (kannabis) whereas the English word hemp is derived from Middle English hempe and the earlier Old English form henep or haenep. The term marijuana may have arisen from the Portuguese marihuango or the Mexican-Spanish mariguana, both of which mean "intoxicant." Marijuana is a term that indicates a preparation made from the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant from which the resin has not been extracted. The use of the term cannabis is international, yet its products and the plant itself can be called many different names. For example, Central Africans refer to cannabis as mata, kwane, M bhanze, or dagga while Indians commonly refer to it as charas, bhang, ganja, or hashish..

Techniques of ingesting marijuana vary. Bongs, or water pipes, pipes, joints, candies, baked goods and even teas are all popular ways of ingesting this drug. Smoking marijuana is the quickest and most efficient way of introducing THC into the blood stream. While eating or drinking it will work, the effect is delayed and not as potent. However it is ingested, THC acts upon molecular targets on brain cells, called cannabinoid receptors. These receptors are activated by chemicals similar to THC called endocannabinoids, such as anandamide. These are naturally occurring in the body and are part of a neural communication network that plays an important role in normal brain development and function. The part of the brain that houses the majority of these cannabiniod receptors are the same parts of the brain that influence pleasure, memory, thinking, concentration, sensory and time perception, and coordinated movement. Marijuana over activates the endocannabinoid system, causing the high and other effects that users experience. This may cause extreme difficulty in completing day to day activities such as driving, reading and socializing with peers. It has been suggested that marijuana is at the root of many mental disorders, including acute toxic psychosis, panic attacks (one of the very conditions it is being used experimentally to treat), flashbacks, delusions, depersonalization, hallucinations, paranoia, depression, and uncontrollable aggressiveness. Marijuana has long been known to trigger attacks of mental illness, such as bipolar psychosis and schizophrenia. This connection with mental illness should make health care providers for terminally ill patients and the patients themselves, who may already be suffering from some form of clinical depression, weigh very carefully the pros and cons of adopting a therapeutic course of marijuana. Research clearly demonstrates that marijuana has the potential to cause problems in daily life or make a person's existing problems worse. In the short term, marijuana use impairs perception, judgment, thinking, impaired motor coordination, anxiety, impaired