Over 91% of Americans support cannabis legalization in some form. Legalization offers safer alternatives to harmful prescriptions, reduces crime & violent crime, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, reduces under-age use, and many more reasons why cannabis should be legal.

Let’s take a look and see if we can understand the different perspectives of the arguments underlying the cannabis legalization debate.

What Are The Benefits Of Legalizing Cannabis?

Various pieces of research continue demonstrating legalizing cannabis for medicinal or recreational purposes will lead to several positive outcomes.

Benefits of legalizing cannabis includes:

• Patients can have safe access to cannabis as an alternative substitute to more harmful synthetic drugs.
• Feeling comfortable using cannabis without fear of legal repercussions.
• A decrease in other crimes, most critical, is the reduction of violent crimes.
• Seed to sale tracking of cultivation, distribution, selling for strict quality & safety control.
• Billions of dollars added to the economy.
• Allows police to focus on actual crime.
• More extensive and widespread collaborative research can be conducted.

With the full legalization of cannabis, society could start seeing a large shift in the reduction of crime while increasing our scientific understanding of how cannabis can benefit health care.

By making a valuable plant illegal with strict penalties instantly creates a black market propagating more and more violent crime.

With the removal of legal barriers and an increase in appropriate regulations, society can have the option to safely access potentially better alternatives -- without risking jail time.

How Does Legalizing Cannabis Help The Economy?

Legal cannabis has the potential to be a substantial economic stimulus on a state and national level through tax revenue and the creation of countless job opportunities.

Not only will the economy experience a large growth in jobs and tax revenue, but investors will also be more readily able to comfortably invest -- as the cannabis industry becomes less volatile and more stable.

Cannabis companies will also be allowed to sell their shares on all U.S. exchanges -- if cannabis is legalized on a national level.

Many states who’ve chosen to expand their markets have predicted that the cannabis industry is helpful to their struggling economies.

How Many Jobs Will Legalizing Cannabis Create?

According to the ICF report, 81,000 jobs could be created in California as a result of legalization.

A new Frontier report predicted up to a quarter of a million jobs will be created by the year 2020.

Cannabis farms, dispensaries, and extraction labs are among a handful of stable locations that will be able to provide several jobs to qualified workers looking to enter the cannabis industry.

To properly grow, harvest, manufacture, and sell quality cannabis-based goods, a large variety of workers will be needed to fill several job roles.

Other secondary sectors (and horizontal industries) can include engineering, lab technicians, architectural firms, security architecture design & installation, secure transportation, marketing, graphic design -- to only name a small few potential job positions.

Job openings within the cannabis space continue to be a direct result of legalization and the widespread demand from the emerging market.

With such a high demand for quality cannabis and a growing desire for a variety of unique products, a significant number of workers will be needed at every level of the industry.

Why Cannabis Should Not Be Legalized?

Published in the journal of Missouri Medicine, attempts to highlight the “lack” of evidence for how cannabis can benefit various conditions.

The persistent arguments within the Missouri journal appear to stem from the catch 22 problem that asserts there’s no evidence of cannabis benefiting conditions.

With the catch 22 issue, the reason why some authorities aren’t acknowledging the vast historical safety record and widespread pre-historical use for countless applications -- is in part due to cannabis being illegal at high government levels in various countries.

Even though some authorities claim cannabis has a lack of valid evidence, there are some concerns revealing some people should probably abstain from using cannabis.

Potential reasons some people shouldn’t use cannabis include.

• Addictive to some with can cause potential withdrawal symptoms
• Potential risk of schizophrenia onset to the genetically predisposed
• Potential risk of other psychotic disorders when starting at young ages
• Potential cognitive impairments
• Can cause respiratory issues
• Can affect driving
• And potentially many more

While there may be valid reasons for some not to use cannabis, there are definitely many more harmful “legal” substances available for use by the general population.

Do The Majority Of American’s Support Legalization?

According to the Pew Research Center, 91% of U.S. adults say cannabis should be legal either for medical and recreational use, while less than 8% want cannabis to remain illegal.

At the partisan and generational level, there’s a bit of a gap on how cannabis legalization should be handled.

Nearly 80% of Democrats want cannabis legalization, while about 55% of Republicans are in favor of legalization.

Furthermore, most millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers desire cannabis legalization, while the Silent Generation (born 1928 - 1945) experienced prohibition propaganda and mostly want cannabis to remain illegal.