I choose to discuss the positive aspects to the legalization of marijuana in America. As with prohibition, if every hard working, bill-paying citizen wants to be involved with an activity, the laws have to be eventually changed to accommodate that. After all, this is a government for the people by the people. To debar the individuals right to choose comes up again, and again. I believe the government has no valid reason to outlaw possession, consummation, or distribution of a plant, let alone one as seemingly harmless as marijuana. .
The topic of marijuana, is one that has been tiptoed around since the "reefer madness" disease swept across mainstream America in the late 1930's. All of which was the brainchild of two men: Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at the time and who happened to be related to someone on the board of Dupont, and William Randolph Hearst, who owned a few large newspaper companies. Both of whom are said to be paid off by Dupont, who was very big in the wood-pulp paper industry, and would profit heavily from hemp being outlawed. So, between the two of them, they whipped up a batch of "yellow journalism", which spread "propaganda that African-Americans and Mexicans were smuggling in a new killer dope weed that would lure white women to fall prey to the seduction of the "Negro", while under the influence of Jazz music" (Herer, 1985) through the nation like wildfire. .
Marijuana had many uses in our society before "reefer madness" came to a head. For over 150 years, the second-most prescribed medication in America was a highly concentrated cannabis extract. According to a February 1938 article in Popular Mechanics, a machine called the decorticator could take one acre devoted to the cultivation of hemp and out produce four acres of traditional wood-based paper, at 1/5 the pollution. "This hemp pulp technology was invented by our own U.
