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Marijuana, Should It Be Legalized? In this year of the millennium , the American populace, even while in the midst of the most prolonged economic boom in the history
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Marijuana Marijuana To toke or not to toke that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of society or succumb to popular
marijuana What is marijuana? Marijuana is the dried flowers, leaves and stems of the Cannabis sativa plant. The main active ingredient in marijuana is THC (delta
Should Marijuana be Legalized Should Marijuana Be Legalized? In this year of the millenium, the American populace, even while in the midst of the most prolonged
Submitted by rye381 on March 25, 2005
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 2239 | Pages: 9
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Marijuana, or Cannabis sativa, is a dioecious plant (which is a fancy way of saying it's a sexy plant; there are separate male and female plants, and they've got to get it on in the pistil and stamen scene), containing upwards of four hundred chemicals. The psychoactive agent, THC, or, for you chemistry savants, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, is much more abundant in the female buds. THC is what makes you laugh uncontrollably at the lamest possible thing when you're stoned.
In colonial America, "hemp" was a major agricultural crop; both Washington and Jefferson raised it. Hemp was valuable because you could use its fibers for rope and canvas and its seeds for soap, lamp oil and birdseed. Preoccupied with finding practical uses for weed, people from temperate climates did not realize the great fun you could have simply by smoking it. Folk weren't so benighted in hot regions like India and North Africa. Here the plant fairly oozes with sticky resin, and is fit to be boiled for tea, ingested, and . . . you guessed it . . . smoked. Here also, perhaps under the psychoactive influence of the drug, they started giving it really cool names like dagga, ganja, bhang and hashish, from which we get the word "assassin."
Along with absinthe, hashish was de riguer for French artists and writers in the late 19th century. At the same time, physicians, who had been recommending tinctures of marijuana for pain relief, began switching to synthetic drugs marketed by a burgeoning pharmaceuticals industry. As the drug became associated with marginal groups - Mexican laborers, blacks, jazz musicians, prostitutes - many states started passing laws against it. In the 1930s, the Bureau of Narcotics (now the Drug Enforcement Agency) got interested in pot. This was the era of "reefer madness," when the government tried to convince the public that marijuana made you crazy, horny and violent, or some unwholesome combination of the three. Pot finally went underground with the...
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