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Position

John Nguyen
English 201A

2/23/09
Why I Smoke Marijuana and Not Cigarettes
When I was growing up, I was taught that cigarettes were a bad and disgusting habit to pick up. Cigarettes were bad for your health, causing cancer and a whole lot of respiratory problems. My uncle used to smoke around me and he used to stink up the whole house, not to mention the bad halitosis he had when he would talk to me. His teeth were so yellow that it looked liked he would brush them with a stick of butter. Growing up around people who smoke cigarettes allowed me to see the effects of cigarettes first hand and everything that I have experienced with cigarettes were mostly bad experiences. Marijuana, on the other hand, I haven’t had a bad experience with. I was only taught that marijuana was bad for you due to the fact that it alters your mind and that it is a gateway drug, leading you to try harsher drugs. I was taught about how bad cigarettes more than I was taught about marijuana and my parents never told me about marijuana. Maybe that’s why I was more susceptible to trying marijuana. And once I did, I never turned back.
Smoking marijuana is not nearly as bad as cigarettes. Studies have shown how damaging to your body cigarettes can be, including everybody that is in the general vicinity of a cigarette smoker. Second hand smoke is as bad as smoking itself. That’s how bad cigarettes are; of course everybody in the world already knows that. But marijuana, on the other hand, isn’t as bad. There has been no scientific fact that marijuana causes cancer. I have never heard of anyone dying because of prolonged smoking of marijuana or being hospitalized for an overdose of weed. In fact, there are studies that found that marijuana can be good for people with certain health problems, like arthritis, helps as a pain reliever, and increases an appetite of a patient, whom...