If I told you there was a plant available to us today that could be grown in pretty much any soil, requires no pesticides and it takes very little maintenance to grow, and this magical plant could be used for a very large number of necessities and goods we use today yet we don’t use it, would you think to yourself “Joe you must be high or on some other cheap drug?”
Well potential naysayers out there, I’m not high nor do I get high, but let me tell you, there is a plant available right now and it is often mistaken to be marijuana but has capabilities that are beyond what you could imagine. It’s called Hemp.
There’s also a plant commonly called Marijuana that has all those same characteristics with a larger amount of a chemical called THC in it. THC, along with other cannabinoids, are showing to have medicinal properties that are quite powerful.
Yet these plants are and have been illegal for quite some time, and the only people who are allowed to grow it have to do so under very tight regulations.
Recently, College Humor went ahead and made a pretty comical video that neatly summed up exactly how Hemp and Marijuana both became illegal.
The Rest Of The Story
This is where things get a little tricky. The challenge is, the people that marijuana is actually harmful to happen to be the ones most culturally obsessed with it. Yet the people who it is safe for, still smoke it, but are not as culturally obsessed with it. Here in lies the education process that needs to take place.
I’m a Millennial and so I grew up during a time where it became so incredibly pushed within pop culture that smoking weed was cool, what you should do everyday and in essence a way to ‘give it to the man.’ When in high school, many of my friends were smoking weed every single day multiple times a day, some of them for 4 years. Some still smoke it every day. Did they change? It’s hard to say.
But this demographic, the high school kids and those up to 25 years of age, are actually at risk when smoking marijuana regularly. Their brains are not developed yet and marijuana interferes with that process. While I did not see this happen to all of the people around me, I certainly did see the overall sharpness of several people diminish as they smoked everyday for years.
Another noticeable danger in cannabis culture is the fact that simply being educated on the pros and cons is often seen as having an imbalanced perspective or a dislike for marijuana, because the internet has made it so that everyone thinks it’s 100% safe, when that isn’t true for the younger demographic of our world.
My point here is, I think Marijuana should be legal entirely, it’s a natural plant. But I believe that in the process of having it be illegal and then having it heavily pumped through pop culture as something cool to do, it got the attention from kids it never would have gotten.
I strongly believe that if this plant were wild, completely legal and available, people would not be smoking in the same way they do today, especially if it wasn’t marketed in pop culture as being a cool thing to do.
Credits:Joe Martino, source
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