Legalize It

That statistic has been unchanged since the early seventies (Glasser 138). .
             According to the American Civil Liberties Union. (ACLU) in the past thirty years ten million people have .
             been arrested for marijuana offensives in the United States, the vast majority of the people arrested were for their.
             own personal use and possession. In 1996 there were an estimated 641,600 marijuana arrests in the United States. .
             85% of those arrests were for mere possession. (Glasser 133). Many people against the legalization of marijuana have .
             said that legalizing it would cause more people to smoke it. In the seventies some states have decriminalized marijuana. .
             Researchers have compared the marijuana use between states that have decriminalized marijuana and states that still had .
             criminal sanctions and have found no difference. In the mid-eighties while marijuana use was on the downfall President .
             Reagan launched the new war on marijuana causing congress to recriminalize marijuana possession, setting a penalty of .
             one year in federal prison for possessing a single joint or less of marijuana. (Glasser 138). With the criminalizing of .
             marijuana the prison systems has been clogged with hundreds of thousands of people for doing a victimless crime.
             In 1996 marijuana-possession arrests exceeded 545,000 nearly a doubling in a five-year period. (Glasser 139). Jeffrey Singer,.
             a Phoenix surgeon and medical spokesman for Drug Policy reform, discovered that people in large numbers felt that the war .
             on drugs was a failure and that focus groups strongly rejected the policy of "do drugs, do time"(Drug Trail, 65).
             Another reason marijuana should be legalized is that marijuana has medicinal value. The idea that cannabis might.
             be proven useful to cancer patient arose in the early 1970s when some young patients receiving cancer chemotherapy .
             found that marijuana smoking reduced their nausea and vomiting (Glasser 143). Advocates for medical marijuana says .