Is Marijuana Good for You?

In recent years, the United States has seen more and more states legalize the use of marijuana whether for medical reasons or for recreational use.  Despite this, many people have views that marijuana is horrible and are completely against the use of the drug.  But if this substance was so bad why would so many states be passing laws that allow people to use it? I decided to research this topic to find out the negative and positive effects of marijuana.

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Positive effects:

Marijuana can be used to treat a number of different disease. One of theses diseases is glaucoma. Glaucoma affects the eyes of a person by causing an increased pressure in the eyeballs which causes problems and can leave a person blind. A study in the 1970s found that marijuana actually decreased to pressure in peoples eyes after being smoked.  This helps people with glaucoma greatly and may help them prevent blindness.

People have also found that marijuana can inhibit cancer cells from spreading. In 2007 the California Pacific Medical center found that cannabidiol, a compound found in the marijuana plant, can help stop the spreading of cancer by shutting off the gene called Id-1.  The Id-1 gene usually aggressively spreads through breast cancer and researchers found that after being treated with marijuana the genes were less prevalent and did not spread as aggressively as before treatment.

Negative effects:

One of the negative effects that i found in my research was impaired or loss of memory. One study in 2011 found that people who use marijuana perform worse on memory tests than people who do not. They recorded the results of 181 people aged 16-20 who took a test called the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning test and found that the people who used marijuana did worse than the people who did not.

Another negative effect is lung problems. This is a quite obvious problem if the consumption of marijuana is done through smoking. When marijuana is done through smoking, the smoke that enters the lungs of a person can lead to problems like bronchitis, coughing, and wheezing.

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Although there are some negative effects with marijuana, in my research I found that the good effects very greatly outweigh the negative effects.  Also, don’t most medicines have side effects also? Many of the pharmaceutical medicines that are prescribed these days have side effects a lot worse than the negative effects of marijuana.

So is marijuana good for you? The answer is yes and no, just like most things in the world it has good effects and bad effects but in my opinion, the good effects outweigh the bad effects by a huge margin.

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