Legalizing Cannabis in Italy: Health, Safety, and Justice Perspectives, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Legalizing Cannabis in Italy: Health, Safety, and Justice Perspectives e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Cannabis Legalisation In Italy there is a topic that always create arguments and discussions because it introduce something “scary” or considered dangerous; maybe it is, but we have to know several informations that could make us think and reflect on reality. I am talking about The Legalization of Cannabis, accepted in many other countries but not in ours. It is a delicate topic to talk about, because Marijuana is considered, even if light, a drug, something addicting and dangerous (More precisely, the illegal substance in italy is THC, which is absent in legal weed), and actually it is, but some fake news, or ideas pushed by fear, could hide us some situations and contraddictions of our State. Scientists said that smoking weed is less addicting then caffeine and alcohol(that is even more dangerous)and especially than substances that are even used in medicine in Italy, such as Xanax or Lexotan, real heavy drugs that are used to fight panic, the same objective that dope has for many people. We always hear about smokers dead to cancer caused by cigarettes( about eighty thousand a year), we know that every Saturday night somebody drives drunk killing himself and other people on the road, but there are less victims caused by light drugs. Of course it has his collateral effects: change of humor, respiratory symptoms, decrease of reflexes and memory. These are some big risks, but studies says us that they hardly ever perist to long term(Science,AAAS). After all having a legal control on drug selling could not only inform and warn people about problems but also reduce them. Besides there are also medical benefits espacially for people who suffer from Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s and it even helps the appetite of the ones who have AIDS(Focus,2017). In 2001 Portugal decriminalized cannabis and it saw an important lowering of HIV cases. And last but not least, many tests on rats showed us that cannabis kills evil cells, so doctors are studying if it could help to weaken tumors.(Le Scienze) Moreover, there is an experiment that proves that Marijuana cannot change our psycho-activity: A scientist called Nicholas Jackson studied two twins (a smoker and a no smoker) and there’s no riduction of intelligence, or difference of behaviour from one to the other. . But these are not the only real reasons to legalize it. The most important thing to know is that cannabis is in the hands of many criminal organizations that gain even millions…this money is used to blow up our democracy,and that’s not a conspiracy theory,it is proved by many news; we can mention “Brevis 2”,an operation that recently stopped a connection of drug dealing between Cosa Nostra and Malaga. Still in Spain in 2004 Al Qaeda carried out an attack to Madrid financed by selling hashish to Camorra(From the book Questione Cannabis,2018). Drug trade is the best way to get money to corrupt important or dangerous social figures and legalization is not a way to defend illegal associations, but a strong weapon to subtract cash from it, because dealing will never stop to be a crime. I don’t want to affirm that we will defeat mafia accepting legal cannabis selling, as Borsellino said, illegal traffic is not mafia’s real “heart” (Borsellino,1989), but nowdays organized crime gains about 6 billions of euros from drug activities, so we can realize that this is not a usless intervention in this case, and I think that the opponents cannot use a speech that talks about a society of thirty years ago to disprove. One bad thing of legalization for many people could be the increase of the use, and many damages for society and young people or even worse, bring someone to try heavy drugs such as cocaine or heroine; Actually in many countries, for example Portugal, Urugay and even USA(thanks to Colorado), the consumption has been reduced, because if it is controlled, not everybody could buy it, especially people under 18. The other pro is that the quantity and the grams would be reduced during the sale, and the money spent on buying weed would go to our State, because nobody should call a pusher. According to surveys made by the cometee that is trying to promote a referendum for legalization, 28% of Italian students uses to smoke weed, while in Canada (that legalized Marijuana in 2018) the number of consumers halved (from 20% to 10%) and the Nation din’t saw any impact on the quantity of car accidents. In Europe Portugal is the Nation with the lowest rate of young smokers: 14%., and most important deaths by overdose passed from 80 to 16 in 2013 (agianst UK and Germany that counted about two thousands deaths that year). Other studies helps us to deny the hypotesis of the passage from light to heavy drugs. Statistically, there are more people who pass from heroin to marijuana than the opposite; in fact cannabis has some important therapeutic effects useful to defeat dangerous addictions As written before, Italy is moving to a referendum for decriminalization, thanks to a petition that gained 600.000 signs. But there’s still confusion and scepticism. But all the critics can be denied because sometimes based on fake news or misundersandings; for example many people think that one of the risks could be the possibility to drive high; believe it or not there is only situation in which Cannabis could kill someone and it is not overdose but a car accident. That could and should be stopped by the Highway Code…Italian traffic rules say that who drives after the assumption of alcohol or drugs, will be punishd with a penalty and arrested (Art.187); one point of the referendum include salso the suspension of driving license. In other States in which marijuana is legal, the number of car accidents has dropped thanks to alerts. We have to precise also that this referendum don’t legitimize any kind of heavy drugs and it will continue to punish the ones who own or cultivate dope and it’s not for personal use. (ReferendumCannabis.it) Someone is worried about a probable increase of health costs and hospital patients… looking at USA’s statistics we can realize that in the age of prohibition there was the highest peak of illnesses caused by drugs and alcohol, because of the bad quality of the products sold by thugs(History). In italy the situation is not so different: Mafia’s Cannabis is often contaminated by toxic substances such as lead or wool… so that’s another point in favor of legalization because a certified product would allow us to know all of his substances and it would also help with the degrowth of hospitalizatons, as it happened in Canada. “And what about promoting high culture?”, well if we think about cigarettes and nicotine, consumers have all the informations about dangerous and collateral effects; the same would be