Are People Stupid or Just Mislead?

Even when I dispel a lot of the myths surrounding marijuana and show many reasons why it should be legal, it’s still hard for some people to come to terms with the realization that life would be a lot better without marijuana prohibition. Even when these people are shown medical studies that find marijuana is not a gateway drug, or sees statistics showing that alcohol and tobacco kill more people every year than marijuana, they still will not let go of what they have been told their whole life. That marijuana is bad and should remain illegal. So are these people stupid? Not at all! You have to remember that support for marijuana is still a relatively new idea, and that there have been decades of anti marijuana propaganda in this country. All of this propaganda runs generations deep, and it becomes very hard to convince someone that the legalization of marijuana is a good thing. It becomes even more difficult when trying to convince a politician or a member of law enforcement, who fights to keep marijuana prohibition alive, of these same facts. These people do not want to be told that they are wrong because they do not want to believe that they have somehow wasted their lives. Now, have these people really wasted their lives? Not at all! These people have just been doing their jobs, but some people can take being wrong much harder than others, and this can lead them to believe that all of their hard work has been for nothing. The fear of one day coming to this realization only makes them fight harder to keep marijuana illegal.

Can these people someday be convinced? Yes I believe most of them can, but it may take them seeing the benefits of marijuana legalization first hand to get it to happen. They will not believe it until they see it with their own eyes. They don’t want to believe that everything they have been told by their government and peers has been false. It makes it seem that the people they trust the most lack credibility. Everyone alive today has been told by people who are long dead that marijuana is a bad thing. We are all sadly a product of a misled society. Every one of us, from the time we were born, was raised to believe that marijuana was harmful and the right thing to do was to keep it illegal. With more statistics and studies starting to surface on the issue, we are starting to find that a majority of the accusations against marijuana are false.

                It’s not that people are stupid; it’s just that they haven’t been willing to examine the opposing argument with an open mind. If you are told something enough times by enough people, you come to believe that what they are telling you is factual. It’s the same reason why, in the 1950’s, people thought if you hid under your desk at school it would save you from a nuclear blast. Or if you masturbated too much you would go blind. Both of these myths were proven false by science, and science can also prove the myths surrounding marijuana to be false as well. We have to continue to convince these people that our strategy concerning the war on drugs hasn’t been working ever since marijuana was criminalized. The strategy that I propose, which legalizes marijuana, is by far the most threatening to people. It goes against everything they have ever been taught since they were young and it isn’t easy for them to accept.

We have to show these people that positive things can happen if marijuana becomes legal. It might not take the first couple of times that you speak with them to finally convince them on the issue, but the more we present our ideas in a reasonable way backed with facts, the more people we will be able to convince.