The other deliberation I attended was on March 1st and was on Marijuana Legalization. I thought that attending this event would be interesting because the topic is very close to the one that my group did, which was about illicit drugs. I was mostly interested in this topic because of the third approach: marijuana for medical uses. Because I want to be a doctor, it was relevant to me. Unfortunately, due to bad weather and an unexpected change in the room number, I ended up being the only “outsider” that attended. Everyone else in the group was presenting. Thus, the deliberation was set up that everyone was seated in a circle and whoever wasn’t presenting was asking questions.
The three approaches talked about were if marijuana should be fully legalized, if marijuana should remain illegal, and if marijuana should be legalized for medicinal purposes. In addition, this deliberation was different than my group’s deliberation because it was 2 hours in length. Thus, each approach group could focus on key questions and the summary group could really review what had happened and what the audience learned that was new from this deliberation.
The introduction went smoothly. I learned that the policies involving marijuana varied greatly between states. Some allowed for recreational uses, some only for medical uses, and some not at all. Everyone also introduced him or herself and talked about why they were interested in this topic. It was interesting to hear how some of them came from or knew friends that came from more poor neighborhoods where smoking marijuana wasn’t too uncommon. There was a girl who was interested in looking at other’s thoughts on federal versus state govern and one boy was interested in hearing about thoughts on the drug policies abroad and what people thought of it.
For the first approach, the group first asked about thoughts of if legalization of marijuana was allowed, if the government should tax users and sellers. They brought up the topic of the benefits of economic boosts that could follow and gave an example of Colorado. In addition, they talked about how one possibility is to use that money to fund in stopping youth use.
For the second approach, the group focused more on the socio-cultural costs such as increased car accidents and crime. They brought up Netherland’s policies and the results of higher crime that followed. However, it was interesting that someone brought up the possibility of the study being less credible because there was no note of the scale of the study and the acknowledgement of other factors.
In the third approach, the groups mainly mentioned different medical problems that can be addressed with the use of marijuana. I really liked this part of the deliberation in that the audience really addressed the problem and tried to come up with a possible solution together. We noted that there was the possibility of having people “fake” pain or illness to get the marijuana. The overall consensus was that it was because smoking weed had that cool factor. Thus, our solution was that a pill form could be made so that cool factor will decrease. We also suggested that this form of medication was made the last resort to prevent fake illnesses.
Overall, despite the limited number of people who participated, I thought this discussion was really interesting and valuable.