Name: Is Marijuana Legalization Inevitable In The US?
Uploaded: 2021-05-14T14:46:58.000Z
Duration: 14 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Cannabis has a complicated history in the United States.

Advanced passive voice

It is only through enlightenment that this scourge can be wiped out.

They both smoke pot. That's jive talk for marijuana

People who push drugs must be put in jail for a minimum of 50 years.

Someone caught, even with a small amount, can be sent to prison.

President Carter today came out for an end to all federal criminal

penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.

Marijuana could very well be the most dangerous threats to an entire

generation of Americans of any drug that we know.

I experimented with marijuana at the time or two, and I didn't like it and

is tied up in feelings about public health, race, crime and morality.

And that complicated relationship makes the rapid change in public

sentiment toward decriminalizing and legalizing the drug even more

surprising. Every ballot initiative involving the decriminalization or

legalization of marijuana passed in the 2020 election.

Voters in New Jersey, Arizona and South Dakota chose to legalize marijuana

South Dakota and Mississippi voted to legalize medical marijuana use.

That means 15 states, along with the District of Columbia, have legalized

Now, a third of the country lives in a state where medical marijuana is

legal, with eight Republican senators representing legal cannabis states.

Additionally, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives just

passed the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement Act or the

MORE Act. The bill would legalize marijuana at the federal level and

implement sweeping regulations and reforms surrounding the drug.

The 2020 election and the House vote reveals something important about the

Marijuana may be one of the few truly bipartisan issues in the United

States right now, with 91 percent of Americans saying it should be legal

for medical use, including nearly six in 10 Americans favoring

legalization for both medical and recreational use.

Despite the long road marijuana had in the U.S..

Legalization advocates think the government may be on its way to be

scheduling the drug after 50 years of it being criminalized at the federal

ended up with a web of contradictory marijuana policy and where the law

There has been a lengthy history of cannabis in the United States that has

generally followed two tracks, medical and recreational.

By the late eighteen hundreds, there were a wide number of medicinal uses

for cannabis. People used it as a pain reliever to treat nausea and even

Its role as a recreational substance is about 100, 120 years old when

migrants fleeing the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico came to the

The migrants were able to recognize cannabis use as a recreational

substance, which was very different than how Americans had been using the

drug. And of course, this becomes immediately an issue because it is a

minority population that is currently being demonized during this period.

Nearly every state west of the Mississippi River past anti marijuana

legislation, and by 1933, about 30 states had outlawed marijuana for

Congress passed the first federal law that addressed recreational marijuana

use in 1937 called the Marijuana Tax Act.

Instead, it required anyone who grew distributed or used marijuana to

register with the federal government and pay a small tax.

What essentially that allowed the federal government to do was to collect

the names and identifying information of everyone who is involved in the

cannabis trade, making it easier to keep an eye on them and essentially

allow the government to survey their activities.

In the 1940s, World War II made hemp patriotic.

The military needed it to create rope and other useful materials.

With the end of the war, measures to crack down on weed ramped up again.

And with the counterculture of the 60s, it became a symbol of protest.

When Richard Nixon entered the Oval Office in 1969, he made drug

prohibition one of his main priorities, culminating in the Controlled

Substances Act of 1970, which created a scheduling system for drugs.

The system is based on two criteria the drugs, medicinal value and the

Schedule one drugs are considered to have no medical value and high

The legislation gave the control of determining which schedule drugs

should fall under to Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, rather than

When Nixon and Mitchell, both of whom were adamantly opposed to marijuana

use because they saw it tied to the counterculture civil rights movement

and the uprisings of the 60s when they tried to put cannabis into Schedule

one, they had a hard time convincing Congress that that was where it

should go in order to reach an agreement with Congress.

They said they would form a commission to study marijuana in the U.S..

Nixon and Mitchell subsequently classified marijuana as a Schedule One

drug alongside heroin, LSD and ecstasy, while the commission, which came

to be known as the Shafer Commission, set about studying marijuana.

The report ended up contradicting that decision, determining after a two

year examination of marijuana users that the drug did not cause the

concerned side effects such as a lack of motivation or increased

aggression. Nixon refused to accept these findings and kept marijuana

But the commission's report didn't go unnoticed.

It became available to the public, and many activists took it upon

themselves to work to decriminalize the drug at the state level.

Between 1973 and 1978, a dozen states across the country decriminalize

marijuana, essentially making possession of up to an ounce of cannabis,

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Is Marijuana Legalization Inevitable In The US?

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