Cause And Effect Of Marijuana On Society

Marijuana is one of the most researched drugs on the planet, but there is also been huge amounts of misinformation. The drug first came to America with Mexican immigrants around the turn of the 20th century. At first, white Americans were afraid of the immigrants with there weed. It was said that marijuana turned them into blood thirsty killers.

One of the first anti-marijuana propaganda films was "high on the range"(1929) in which it is implied that the drug will make you kill people the second you smoke it. Earlier in 1914 the El Paso ordnance was the first law making the drug illegal but the law was targeted towards the Mexicans they were so afraid of. The next law on the subject was the "Marijuana Tax Act of 1937" that said that without a special tax stamp, of which the treasury department made none of, you could not possess the drug. Creating an new class of criminal over night.

More laws have been made, first making it tougher on users of the drug, later easing jail terms after space became limited. With the, "Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970" mandatory minimum sentences were removed. Overcrowding of jails and prisons is becoming a problem again. The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) National Inmate Survey (1995), found that 26.4% of inmates stated that

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they were currently sharing a cell with another inmate. Furthermore, 12% of those inmates sharing a single cell felt threatened by their cell-mate.

Marijuana's effect on the person include decreased reaction time, short term memory loss, temporary loss of fertility, raised heart rate, and frequent acute chest illnesses and a downright horrible case of the munchies.