Think about it, they fine people so much money for being in possesion of marijuana or growing it. If they made it legal they would lose all of their money in fines, court costs, hiring lawyers, and handeling court cases. Prosecuters would also lose money because they would not have as many people to prosecute. If the government would legalize marijuana for personal uses, I think that the crime rates in the U.S would decrease. People would not be dieing over shady drug deals and prisons would not be as crowded as they currently are. Many people are sent to prison for marijuana possesion and become more educated criminals rather than an innocent marijuana user which they were before entering prison. Priosns just make people educated in commting harmful crimes such as auto theft, murder, breaking & entering, bomb making, and many others. If they sold marijuana in stores then people would not have to go to great legenths to get it and the murder rate would also decrease. People would not be worried about taking someone else out to get control of the drug trade. It would be everywhere and so easy to get people would not care. I am not saying that smoking marijuana is good for you and everyone should support it. I'm just saying that leaglizing it for medicinal and personal uses would improve the U.S and stop a big part of crimes commited. It would also help a lot of people with medcial conditions they currently suffer from. In my opinion, I would say that the phase of hippies gave marijuana a bad image. Hippies were known as people who dressed sloppy, lived in vans, loved to party, and used large amounts of marijuana. Many people just looked at them and said the reason why they are like that is because of their marijuana use. It's just the fact that they chose to live their life that way and smoking marijuana had nothing to do with it. No matter what anyone says or does, marijuana will probably never be legalized for personal & medicinal use because of the profits made by the U.