Marijuana: Will You Take the Risk?

  
Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug today, except for two states, where it is completely legal.  The number of states in America that have legalized marijuana for medical uses is 21. Whereas Washington and Colorado are the only two states that have legalized the recreational use of Marijuana. Washington has not yet licensed recreational outlets but Colorado has.
   On January 1st this year, Colorado became the first state in America history to allow the sale of recreational marijuana. Recreational meaning there are stores in Colorado where you can just walk in and buy weed, just like alcohol or Tobacco.  People who are older than 21 with a Colorado ID can buy up to an ounce at licensed stores. You can read more about Colorado’s recreational marijuana shops here. Although the buying age is restricted ,it is obvious that people under 21 can easily get in touch with marijuana from the people who bought marijuana at the recreational stores.
   Although marijuana is known to have been used for medical reasons, there are still arguments both for and against smoking weed. The high addictiveness of marijuana is becoming a major problem for teens in America. In this article, it is said that nearly 1 in every 10 teens have smoked weed at least 20 times or more in the past month. The high addiction is not the only problem, marijuana is also known that it might have long term effects that could be quite harmful to the human brain. You can read about the pros and cons of smoking weed here.Researchers state that more research is needed to completely determine marijuana’s benefits and it’s true long-term effects. This means that the long term effects of marijuana could be nothing or bad. People who smoke a descent amount of weed periodically could be completely safe or could have harmful effects to their brain when they get older. Personally I would not take the risk, but it seems like many people in America ignore the risk or they simply don't know the potential consequences. I think the latter is more common now days because I have heard many people say that smoking weed has zero risks. I have heard some people say it's even good for you. I don't know where people got these ideas but they obviously haven't researched enough because there are hundreds of articles out there debating about the pros and cons of smoking weed and frankly there is no right answer yet.
Do you think people who smoke marijuana don't know the possible long-term effects or they just don't care about them?

Prioritizing Visual Aspects

    When I was in New Orleans with my family the past week, I was surprised by the number of street performers I encountered, each one of them with different talents. One performance that I saw outside when I was in a restaurant particularly drew my attention, which was a man just standing with his dog laying on the ground. The dog was just laying on the ground, facing upward and was holding a bunch of dollar bills in his hand. Within in a couple minutes, there was a big crowd around the man and the dog. There was a different performance going on right by the man and the dog, which was a group of people playing jazz. The number of people watching this performance was considerably smaller than the number of people around the man and the dog. The man and the dog was probably there for  20 minutes and then left, whereas the musicians were still playing and they have already been playing for a long time too.
    I thought it was very ironic seeing this sight because the two performances obviously had different levels of effort and skills required but the one with significantly less effort was making much more money than the other one simply because it involved a cute animal that everyone liked. People decided to give their money to the man and the dog instead to the musicians simply because everyone love cute animals.
    I think this shows the basic thinking of the people in America which is that they get interested in the visual aspects of things more than anything else. The dog was more visually appealing than the musicians playing jazz. I think this thinking can be seen in various other situations. It can be connected to what we have been learning in class, the inequality of African Americans. The unequal treatment of African Americans because of the darkness of their skin could have been an extension of Americans' tendency to judge on the visual aspects.
    Do you think American people prioritize visual aspects more than other aspects?