Legal Mari Guiana Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Legal Mari Guiana - Essay Example On the other hand, some states such as California, Hawaii, Washington and New Jersey among others have passed laws to allow for the citizens to grow and use marijuana for medical purposes. Countries such as Mexico, Uruguay, Netherlands and Argentina among others have partially legalized the use of Marijuana whereby citizens are allowed to consume and possess certain amounts of the drug for recreational purposes (Bakalar, 2007). This paper is a critical evaluation of why or why not marijuana should be legalized. Marijuana should be legalized as a way of creating revenues for the government, in terms of taxation. Failing to do so encourages illegal trade whereby scrupulous dealers form organizations, through which the product is traded in secrecy and in high prices. These illegal drug dealers continue to enrich themselves and this motivates them and makes it affordable for them to operate and finance other illegal businesses such as gun trade, human trafficking among others, which include criminal activities such as gang violence. Critics in this debate may have forgotten the impact the ban on alcohol sale and use in the US in the 1920s had on the society but it may be important to remind them that it resulted to widespread illegal trade of the product and the emergence of powerful groups, mafia, which took advantage of the inability of the government to enforce the law (Rosenthal, 2003). In fact, it is believed that this formed the basis of the formation of drug lordship in the country as t hese cartels had already been accustomed to the lucrative trade and hence had to venture into other similar businesses once the ban was lifted and alcohol became accessible in the general market. In this context, criminal gangs compete over markets whereby one gang claims ownership of a certain territory and whenever any other gang member crosses this territory in search of customers, violence erupts leading to