MARIJUANA IS INDEED DANGEROUS

In his Monday letter, "Marijuana should be legalized, taxed," Kirk Muse
stated that our government hasn't been able to eradicate the use of
marijuana, and that it is as highly used as it was in the 1970s.

Just because we have yet to succeed in defeating the use of marijuana
doesn't mean that we should just give up. Just think if the English would
have taken that attitude when they were fighting the Nazis, they would be
speaking German.

Muse is wrong. We must fight against the use of this illegal drug.

Marijuana is illegal for a reason. One is that marijuana is what is known
as a gateway drug. Gateway drugs are easily obtainable legal or illegal
drugs that serve as the drug user's first experience with a mind altering drug.

Two studies, "Sequences and Stages in the Patterns of Adolescent Drug Use"
from the Archives of General Psychiatry, and "From Beer to Crack:
Development Patterns of Drug Involvement" from the American Journal of
Public Health, report that almost all those who eventually used illegal
drugs such as crack cocaine, heroin, etc., first used marijuana. From the
later journal article, only 10 percent of the high school seniors polled
who used crack cocaine did so before trying marijuana.

Muse said taxation of government regulated marijuana sales is a good source
of revenue. The financial cost related to the health problems caused by the
legaldrugs is high as it is.

Why should we as a people become so permissive as to allow what is now
illegal to become legal, so that people can travel down the slippery slope
of drug-induced fun, only to find that when they hit the bottom, what was
once fun is now physical and psychological misery? And why should we pay
financially as well as emotionally for what could be prevented?

Corbett Brown

Tempe