Rhetoric & Writing

Hello, my name is Juan Guzman and I’m from El Paso, TX. In regards to marijuana I have a deep distaste for it. This feeling wasn’t created out of nowhere, it stemmed from experiences from many years ago. It all starts with three brothers.

My eldest brother is currently 25 and I looked up to him for some time when I was younger. About 4 years ago in an argument with my mother, which was about my other brother, my mother told him that he had smoke weed when he was 13 and my brother objected with, “but I stopped.” this obviously affected me as I had looked up to my brother as a straight-arrow sort of guy. I mean this was a guy whose idea of a party was having his soccer friends over and eating donuts and drinking soda.Now my other brother is a different case, he has smoke Mary Jane for the past 8 years. My mother caught my brother smoking weed at the age of 15 and I was their to witness the horrifying results. At first my brother promised to quit and for a while my mother believed him. Less than a year later my mother decided to have him do a drug test and it came up positive. Despite many pleas from my mom he didn’t want to stop. So he kept doing whatever he wanted, just being a malandro.

The youngest of the third by an age difference of 5 years noticed how his older brothers had both fallen to the wacky tobacky. He saw how one managed to pick himself up and the other couldn’t even get on his knees. It was then that he decided to try and stay away from the green stuff. So far he has stayed true to his word and most likely due to his picky nature and the hatred of the foul smell of marijuana.

One substance, three brothers and three paths. The oldest is currently living in Odessa, TX happily with his wife and child and has been drug free for years. The middle one is currently a smoker and has been charged with possession various times. He will get out of jail in three days time for violating probation which was being in possession and probably go back to what he was doing. The youngest one just started college and is hoping to keep away from the left handed cigarette.

Now that my personal connection is out of the way the real elephant in the room is the legalization of marijuana. When it comes to marijuana despite me not being a fan of it have no problem with its legalization. Many argue the health risks of pot (http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana) while others argue the benefits. To me that is not really important since I don’t do marijuana.

The previous encounters of the people around me and pot have cause me to dislike it, however, that shouldn’t mean that having weed should not be legal. I don’t like cigarettes but I would not make an outcry over its legal status. I think people should be able to make their own choices and if they want to smoke marijuana then they smoke marijuana. The only reciprocation should be same as with other stuff, when you start taking it out on people that’s when we have a problem.

I feel that we don’t know everything about marijuana and putting aside my feelings can’t really say if it’s good or bad. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute for Drug abuse, even notes , “Whether smoking or otherwise consuming marijuana has therapeutic benefits that outweigh its health risks is still an open question that science has not resolved.” She is just pointing out the fact that there is not definite answer on whether it is good or bad.

Hi, my name is Shayla Myers and I’m from Dallas TX! I have two older brothers, one who came to UT himself, and another who I’ll talk to about later. So to be quite frank with you  I have personally smoked marijuana. Young, and naïve, I fell under the influence of my surrounding peers, only to get up and regret it till this day. However, unlike me, most are still suppressed by this green, emotionless foliage.

What is it about marijuana that people feel the need to claim over? Is it the so called high? Is it the feeling of being cool? Well any one of them can tell you their own reasoning, but can anyone explain the truth?

As humans, we tend to take advantage of what’s handed to us. Ever heard the phrase “…All good things must come to an end”, a classic idiom from American idioms? Well, that’s an example of this circumstance. What was meant to heal and cease pain, has now been downed upon because of humanity’s own demand for personal gain.

In this hyperlink, you can see some quite interesting facts of the history of marijuana. http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000026#2900-bc-1599-ad

So, as biased as I may seem, I still have mixed feelings towards the use of marijuana. While I believe its usage can be taken advantage of, I still don’t want it to be illegal. You can’t just make someone not do something. It’s like telling a child they can’t have candy. All their going to do is want it more. Well, at least I know I would…

When It comes to putting things into our body, shouldnt it just be us, the people, who decides what goes into it? Yeah, yeah, maybe the government is trying to protect our health, but if they were really trying, they would have shut down half of these fast food restaurants. So maybe it’s just to protect America’s reputation. We are pretty much a disliked country to many, and legalizing marijuana would just add to the “Why We Despise America”  list, and we don’t want that.I suppose now would be a good time to bring up my other brother. He is a 34 year old man who sadly has cancer and has struggled with it for many years now. He has been on his death bed twice and through those times I thought I was going to lose him… However, today he  is doing rather fine, and when he’s not, he can get medical marijuana prescribed to him.

Now to all of you who are feeling bad for my brother or just glad he gets to use medical marijuana, I’m going to stop you there. This is where I go back to my other conflicting point of view. My brother is an example of  how people take advantage of a health supplement. He plays his cancer card and gets to smoke it whenever he feels the need.

If I’m being totally honest, I believe it wasn’t the cancer that changed his life for worse, but instead the marijuana. If I could take it away from him, I would. However, like I said earlier, you can’t just tell someone they can’t do something. All they are going to do is want it more…

Teachers, adults, and parents have all at one point said, “Drugs are bad. They will kill you. People that use them are criminals and will end up ruining their lives. Do not do drugs.” From a very early age I, and I imagine all of us, have heard words like these constantly. But bring from from The Rio Grande Valley, which is a major drug trafficking area, made me realize that there is some truth to these statements, yet that’s only one side to a broader and more complex situation.

What has really shaped my views on drugs, and marijuana especially, is the media and pop culture. Media, such as my local news, always had something to say about x amount pounds of marijuana seized on the border, which I live about 15 minutes away from. And of course the weekly mug shot of a disgruntled looking man with messy hair and bloodshot eyes being reported as arrested for possession of marijuana.  Watching the news when I was younger, I always thought “They should be getting arrested and the drugs should be taken away because drugs are very very bad!”

As I got older, I was exposed to more “adult content” I would say and the first instance of pop culture in which I observed marijuana being used on tv was in That 70s Show. At first, I hated the show because I was stuck in the elementary school mindset of “Drugs are bad. People that use them are criminals.” But then my friends started talking more about the show and I decided to give it another chance. I saw an episode completely and realized they were basically normal teenagers, they just liked to use marijuana. They weren’t murderers, robbers, or rapists. And I was completely mind blown. All my life I had thought that people who use drugs belonged in the same category as evil law breakers but That 70s Show taught me this was not the case.

Ultimately what really made me a proponent of the legalization of marijuana was a video I saw a while ago on Youtube. A guy performs tasks once while being high on marijuana and again while being drunk. While I had originally watched the video for the laughs, it really got me thinking. By the end of the video, to me it was obvious that the guy performed better at tasks while high and also did not experience any consequences the day after, as opposed to being drunk. So my logic over the marijuana debate is this: Why is the use of marijuana illegal when it has less negative effects than alcohol?

You can tell from the Willie Nelson picture in the sidebar that I love music. When I was a kid, my parents bought me a brown plastic cassette player, and I carried it everywhere. I am mildly embarrassed of the cassette tapes I played over and over again (mostly Disney soundtracks and ’80s country music), but I recognize that the music I listened to had a huge impact on my childhood and the person that I have become. I grew up in the relatively isolated state of Wyoming (before the invention of the Internet and the iPhone), and tapes like Dolly Parton’s Rainbow (1987) and the Aladdin (1992) soundtrack were my window onto the world outside my hometown.

So it probably isn’t a surprise that when I think about marijuana I think about how I have heard it portrayed in music. To be honest, I can’t think of many songs that were written before the late 2000s that talk specifically about pot. Dolly smokes it in Nine to Five (1980), and Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and other people were definitely smoking it in their tour buses, but they were mostly silent about it in their music. When the subject did come up, you had to really listen for it. For example, in “Me and Paul” (1971), Willie sings that he “was almost busted in Laredo, but for reasons that [he’d] rather not disclose,” and that “if you’re staying in a motel there and leave, don’t leave nothing in your clothes.” There are lots of things you can get into trouble for leaving in a motel room, but since it’s Willie singing it seems pretty obvious that he’s talking about marijuana. Like I said, though, you have to listen for it.

In recent years the taboo on mentioning pot in popular music has disappeared. In 2009, I was shocked to hear Charlie Mars on the radio frankly inviting his friends to “come over and get high while [they] listen to The Dark Side of the Moon.” In the years since then pot has worked its way into hit songs even in that most conservative of musical genres (and one of my personal favorites)–country. In 2010, Eric Church had a hit with “Smoke a Little Smoke,” and in 2013’s “Follow Your Arrow,” Kacey Musgraves tells us that when “the straight and narrow gets a little too straight” we should go ahead and “roll up a joint.”

The more visible using marijuana has become in songs and other forms of popular media the more people have accepted it as normal behavior. I think this is mostly a good thing, but still I have to wonder if something hasn’t been lost with the total mainstreaming of pot in American culture. Back in 1971, rolling a joint meant something. Kris Kristofferson was a long-haired liberal who was friends with Janis Joplin and rejuvenated country music with a folk and hippie sensibility. For Willie Nelson, who felt stifled by the lack of artistic freedom afforded him in Nashville, making subtle references to smoking pot was an act of defiance. Now, singing glibly about taking hits from a bong is business as usual in the music industry (country included), and according to one of my favorite blogs, Saving Country Music, Willie is getting ready to open his own chain of weed-related products and stores. Where is the rebellion in that?