Informative Article Revising

Wen 1

Kan Wen

Dr. Veronica Flanagan 

WRIT-1A-03

11/2/18

The Truths of Marijuana

"Cannabis is an extremely harmful substance! It will kill you! It is a gateway drug that will let you break into the abyss of drugs!" Presumably, these words have been repeated in your ears more than five hundred times. In the United States, these views are like Justin Bieber’s new song. No matter how you hide, you will always hear it on a radio station somewhere, even without knowing it. Most of the time, these views have been identified as facts, constantly spreading among parents and schools, and constantly forcing young people to accept these views and avoiding them on the road to drug use. As a bogeyman who scares young people, these concepts are not much of a problem, but now, you are not longer a teenager, you stepped into college. You have your own ability to think and be responsible for your actions, so you should correctly understand what marijuana is. So, therefore, in this article, I willed the way and use actual data and information to tell you what marijuana is.

You may think that marijuana is harmful to the human body, but the truth is, people already have enough evidence to prove that marijuana is not a deadly "weapon" more than a decade ago! In today’s society, due to the tireless propaganda of the media, whenever people bring up drugs, what comes to mind is often some terrible pictures. For example, violent heroin smokers, alcoholics who have heart attacks, or old smokers who get cancer. Therefore, when people think of marijuana, they will think that it is, like cigarette and alcohol, an extremely harmful substance to the human body. However, just because most people think so does mean it is right. According to NBC's 2015, unnatural deaths caused by marijuana cannot be found in any case in the country! In contrast, the number of deaths caused by alcohol each year is 88,000, and what is even more frightening is that the number of deaths caused by cigarettes per year is 480,000! Marijuana has been found not to be fatal, in comparison to cigarettes and alcohol, and thus can be seen as a less harmful substance. Not only that, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey showed that many people who smoked cannabis did not continue to smoke other "dangerous" drugs. On the contrary, many people do not even continue to smoke marijuana. This also proves that the addiction to marijuana is very low and does not cause much harm to the human body.

BUT, marijuana is not completely safe. In a study at Duke University, scholars found that "those who used pot more than once weekly before age 18 displayed more severely impaired intelligence, slower reaction times, shorter attention spans, and poorer listening skills than those who began using marijuana after Age 18” (Fleming). In other words, if you are a young person under the age of 25, smoking marijuana is likely to have an adverse effect on your brain. However, if you are older than 25, or if your brain is fully developed, smoking marijuana is just your choice.

You may be wondering as you are reading this, “if marijuana is so harmless, why are people so afraid of it?” In fact, people have never been afraid of it, even from thousands of years ago! According to the document "Farming communities arose sometime before 8000 BP in China, but how much earlier is not yet known. In general, people in northern China domesticated foxtail and broomcorn millet (Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum), hemp (Cannabis sativa), and Chinese cabbage (Brassica campestris), among other crops, while their contemporaries to the south domesticated rice. Water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), swine, and chickens were also domesticated, but their earliest history is not yet documented in any detail" (Ordish et al.). In ancient times, cannabis, like other plants, is part of the human implant system!

So, what changed people's perceptions of marijuana? In fact, this is all a tool for government propaganda. In the 1800s of the United States, marijuana was a completely legal medical item. But after a while, with the immigration problem in Mexico and the outbreak of war, cannabis became the primary scapegoat. All crimes and diseases are blamed on marijuana. As a result, in 1937, cannabis was officially illegalized. (Booth) So does the government know that marijuana is harmless? What about just see what John Ehrlichman,an aide of the Nixon administration, said in 1994,: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then Criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did" It sounds terrible, right? I still can't believe that this is an actual quotation.

In conclusion, it true that cannabis may have some effect on an individual’s mental health, especially if they are below 18 years of age. However, it is important for you, the reader, to understand how harmless marijuana is compared to other serious drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes which, despite the high rates of deaths caused by both drugs, are not considered less dangerous. It is, therefore, important that one be wise and knowledgeable when making up one’s mind in the opposition towards marijuana, without getting influenced by the ignorant rants made on the media and by people.

Works Cited

Baum, Dan et al. "[Report] | Legalize It All, By Dan Baum | Harper's Magazine". Harper's Magazine, 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/. Accessed 1 Nov 2018.

Booth, Martin. Cannabis: a history. Macmillan, 2015.

Fleming, Kelly. "What Smoking Weed Does to Teen Brains". The Stranger, 2018, https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-smoking-weed-does-to-teen-brains/Content?oid=20884581. Accessed 1 Nov 2018.

"No High Risk: Marijuana May Be Less Harmful Than Alcohol, Tobacco". NBC News, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/legal-pot/marijuana-safer-alcohol-tobacco-study-shows-n312876. Accessed 1 Nov 2018.

Samhsa.Gov, 2018, https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresults2012/NSDUHresults2012.pdf. Accessed 1 Nov 2018.

Ordish, George et al. "Origins of Agriculture". Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/agriculture. Accessed 1 Nov 2018.

reflection

In this writing process, because I have a better understanding of this topic, my pen are much "smoother." Basically, there aren't many blocks, and the whole article is very fast produce. However, when I examined the material, I realized a severe problem, that is, how to choose between "information" and "entertainment." Based on my first writing experience, I quickly found a classmate and discussed with him the content of this writing. I exchanged opinions with three of my classmates, but I did not satisfy me. The articles of other students are very "formalized." Compared to a favorite, informative article for the public, their essays were more like an academic paper. I want to keep my article easy to read and make the reader feels like talking to me directly, which I believe this is the best way of informative. Therefore, I did not take the opinions of the students this time. In the end, interest readers became the core purpose of my writing.

In general, because of the subject matter of this writing, the style of writing is different from the last time, I can quickly write a lot of things out. But at the same time, I also encountered the same problem as the previous time, I don't know how to chose the content. But this time, because I quickly compared and discussed with my classmates, I promptly set goals and topics and made a lot of changes to my article about this topic, including content and grammar. Therefore, this writing is an enjoyable process.

By the way, MLA is hard to remember.