Legalizing Cannabis in Alberta

Both the proponents and opponents have their respective stand to back up their positions (18). However, irrespective of people’s stand the most important thing to consider is whether the proponent and opponents reasons are based on hope for a better tomorrow or the fear of tomorrow. The most common goal that the opponents of Cannabis legalization based on is that the drug is highly abusive and has ruined the lives of many people. They argued that most of those people who have used the drug end up being addictive and with poor health. On the contrary, the proponents say that Cannabis gives people pleasure and can as well serve medicinal purposes. It has always been related to addiction, health problems, among other criminal activities.

But the public opinion has been adjusting to the point that some of the regions have decriminalized Cannabis. Proponents argue that there are solid reasons for the legalization of cannabis. Many people are still concerns about the effect that Cannabis use may have on consumers and the community at large. This implies that despite multiple efforts to justify the legalization of cannabis the controversy continues. Besides the opponents also believe that legalizing cannabis will make many people including the teens to use it and thus corrupting the entire society by altering not only the health but also the morality of the people. On the contrary Proponents believe that cannabis is restricted for no substantial reason. In fact, they think that cannabis is less harmful than some of the legal drugs like tobacco and even alcohol as such banning or criminalizing cannabis is such huge hypocrisy (Osborne et al.

The proponents argue that cannabis has some health benefits like treatment of glaucoma and even suffocating epilepsy (30). The proponents further suggest that some substance like tobacco is even more addictive but scientifically talking there is no sign that cannabis can lead to psychological addiction. Room says that marijuana from cannabis acts as a gateway drug that most often introduces consumers to heavy drug abuse (1377). As such they fear that if cannabis is legalized then, it means that many young people will be introduced into drugs and probably the whole society will be affected since the use of marijuana will introduce the young people to even more hard drugs. While according to proponents, legalization of cannabis act will give the government many billions of money every year.

And this kind of money will emanate from tax revenues on pot sales and even in the judicial savings not forgetting the cost of derived from jailing smokers. In addition it is estimated that legalizing cannabis will eliminate about one billion dollars spend annually to addressing cannabis related crimes. Legalization of the act of cannabis will ensure that there is more control of the drug and all activities about the problem. In fact, legalization of the drug is a good alternative as compared to criminalization. Therefore it is vital that the government realizes that Canada in the past era is different from modern Canada as such the is the need to adjust the policies to suit modern Canada since the requirements and the nature of contemporary Canada is different from past Canada in 1990’s when the drug and substance act was initiated.