Miles Rosen
Final Essay

Developmental Choices- Marijuana over other substances Marijuana is an illegal substance in the United States of America. The drug is no worse than alcohol and cigarettes in anyway; plus those two harmful substances are actually legal. Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes are statistically, and have been proven to be, lethal. The big question by many individuals is, “why shouldn’t it be legal?” (Polley interview) Marijuana is the one drug out there that can cure the most diseases and it has taken potential money out of the American economy by keeping it in the black market. This drug can potentially reverse the fall in our declining environmental health. Marijuana has been proven to be non-addictive by almost every medical research team in America and by research conducted by other countries but paid for by the American government. Researches conducted by specialists have shown that the United States population is uneducated on the benefits of this drug and on the positive affects it can have on the American population. Marijuana should be the developmental choice if someone were to start drug use. The only negative aspect to development that marijuana could cause would be if a woman used marijuana while pregnant. This can greatly affect a child’s development. It is associated with memory problems and depressive personality traits. Though marijuana has many beneficial outcomes over other drugs, pregnant women should not take it. Alcohol is a depressant that takes lives of people by overdosing or by driving drunk. It has been an accomplice in multiple suicides, rapes and murders. It causes birth defects and irregularities in development if you overuse. It has been the cause behind the popular organizations and groups such as: drug abuse resistance education, mothers against drunk driving, students against drunk driving, and Alcoholics Anonymous. In the history of alcohol, the government has had alcohol in a prohibition. When it wasn’t in prohibition, the government raised the drinking age from eighteen to twenty one. The majority of the US population is uneducated on the basic knowledge that alcohol is a drug. Society is no aware of the dangers of this drug. It has lead many innocent people being raped by someone that was drunk or killed in a multiple of different ways. The NORML executive, Tyler Gomez, says “alcohol kills 35,000 people a year solely by overdosing.” That number doesn’t even take into count the vast number of people killed by other factors. This statistic is alarming because in the history of marijuana use, there has been reportedly zero deaths from overdosing” (Gomez interview). Alcohol has been proven time and again that it is a very addictive drug. This harmful drug is legal at age twenty-one while marijuana is illegal to everyone even though “Marijuana is not addictive” (Gomez interview). Marijuana is less harmful in ones development than alcohol. The surgeon general warning, that is directly printed onto each cigarette carton, has established that Cigarette smoking is addictive and can be lethal. It is a United States official law to have the warning label on every box. There are laws all around this country prohibiting smoking in public places. There have been numerous accounts of riots and protests outside of major tobacco companies trying to rid the country of this addictive product. On any given day, an average person will hear at least one story of how cigarette smoking has killed someone that they hold dear to them. They can hear this on the streets, in the paper or on television. “Tobacco related deaths exceed 400,000” (Gomez interview). One example of a cigarette carton reads:smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy, quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health, smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal