The Legalization of Marijuana :: Legal Illegal Marijuana Pot Law

The debate over the legalization of marijuana is active in the United States. The problem is, most people aren’t fully educated on the good things that marijuana can bring forth. For thousands of years marijuana was not only legal, it was a common crop. It is only in the past ninety years or so that marijuana has been found to be not only unusable, buy also harmful and extremely illegal in the United States. With all the information I have received and statistics I have discovered, I am a strong advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana in the United States. It is very understandable if people believe that the use of marijuana is morally wrong. This is an argument that many people have against the legalization of the drug. My belief is that, there are many things that people find morally wrong and would never do themselves, but are still legal. Just because marijuana is legal does not mean it is being forced upon you. Everyone should be able to make that decision on his or her own. Marijuana use is known as a â€Å"victimless crime,† which means it can only harm the user, therefore shouldn’t the user make that decision on their own? I believe that one of the main reasons marijuana should be legal is because of the way it was criminalized in the first place. In the years before the depression there was a significant growth of Mexican-Americans in the Western part of the United States as a result of the revolution in Mexico in 1910. As the depression hit, larger farms started using the Mexicans as cheaper labor, which in turn put many smaller farmers out of business and caused much tension. These Mexican laborers were known to use the marijuana plant as a recreational drug by smoking the leaves of the plant. Sprouting from the many Mexicans working on farms, many farms harvesting the hemp plant popped up in Mexico itself. Around the same time many Mormons from the Salt Lake City area were traveling to Mexico. In their return they would bring back marijuana for the sole purpose of recreational use. The Mormon Church did not approve of this behavior and ruled against it, which in turn prompted the very religious state of Utah to pass the first known law against marijuana in 1915. Many other Western states followed in years to come. But, it was not until the state of Montana outlawed the drug in 1927 that the truth behind the outlaw came out.