Marijuana is illegal because it's considered an illicit drug. There are many things about marijuana that the public hasn't been told, such as medical marijuana. If someone came up to you and asked you, "Do you know the uses marijuana can be used to help the severely sick?- chances are you'll be dumbfounded by the question and your only thought would be, "Marijuana is illegal, so it's bad."" Even though it is illegal doesn't mean that the law is right. Marijuana should become legal for medical use.
Marijuana is everywhere; it'll be hard for anyone to say that they never seen marijuana be smoked, touched, or just seen as buds. Marijuana is the most used drug in American besides alcohol and tobacco. Over 80 million Americans have used it before. Some 20 million Americans have smoked marijuana in the past year and over 11 million people smoke it casually. "Alcohol kill about 50,000 people a year from alcohol poisoning a year and tobacco kills about 400,000 people a year; the smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. . It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat . than alcohol or tobacco." (The Lancet; The Lancet is a British medical journal). .
There has been a myth that marijuana leads to harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin. The cannabis-using cultures in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America show no tendency for other drugs. The gateway theory took hold in the sixties, when marijuana became the leading new recreational drug. It was challenged by events in the eighties, when all of a sudden cocaine was being used more a lot more than smoking pot, in which that didn't marijuana with the name "the gateway drug- ("Survey: Hawaii war on pot pushed users to 'ice,'" Honolulu Advertiser, April 1, 1994 p. 1.). The only reason people start using other drugs is when there is a pot shortage in the area, or if they were dealing marijuana, they would deal other drugs and end up using those because they're around it a lot of their time.
