Julian Perry 17

Persuasive Speech

Hello, my name is Julian Perry, and I'm an alcoholic. In all honesty, I've never had a drop and don't necessarily have a desire to, and yet I naturally say that phrase with such a tone of guilt that it gets one thinking; what creates this feeling of embarrassment associated with drinking? There must be something wrong with it, right? Well, yes. Compare it to a drug such as marijuana, illegal, and you can see that quite easily. A drug that's banned in most states can't have more benefits than a drug that is legal. It can't be less harmful, right? Well, that's the problem. Using the standards for drug use that we use today, marijuana should be legalized, at least for medical purposes.

Alcohol is accepted in a variety of situations. It's not uncommon to see people sipping on wine at a wedding, taking a shot of tequila among friends at a party, and even using vodka to sterilize your crazy Uncle Bill's wounds after he thought it a good idea to show you that bears just want love too. Alcohol has its uses in medicine, but so does marijuana. Arthritis, glaucoma, shingles, cancer, and even seizures can be treated with marijuana. Little things too, like motion sickness and asthma, are subdued. CNN recently did a report on one particular family's experience with the drug in medical reference. Matt and Paige Figi were building a family together, but one day their three-month-old daughter Charlotte had a seizure. A little while later, she had another. Five years later, Charlotte was up to 300 seizures, averaging half an hour each, every week of her life. This disabled her ability to grow and learn as any healthy child naturally would. No medicine was helping. No one can ever feel the pain that her parents sat through for five years, knowing that their little one could be only moments away from the seizure that ends her life. There hadn't been much research involving marijuana's effect on children, but the one doctor who would actually prescribe medicinal marijuana to a five-year-old girl ended up being right, and this family can now see their daughter's personality for the first time ever. Three seizures a month, now. Better yet, the chemical in marijuana that relieves seizure victims of their epilepsy is CBD, not the chemical THC which causes the psychoactive associated with smoking marijuana. Using a strain low in THC, they were able to completely disable the intoxication and save Charlotte's life.

Many mental disorders, including aspergers and autism, are also on the list. The Autism Support Network and the Huffington Post have written about this, both reporting that autism becomes much less prominent in patients using medical marijuana, and when you view the list of side effects surrounding pharmaceutical treatments, it's easy to see why a parent might be OK with a less conventional method. Loss of appetite, twitches, many unpleasant things. I should know. My brother was diagnosed autistic fairly early on, but I never noticed. He was always a little bit weird, thankfully having only a minor form, but that was just him. I love that older brother more than anything else in the world, and he really changed when we started trying to treat him. It was always something different, with every drug we picked. Something was always off about him, and it was a very hard time for us. He was just never my brother. Close, but never quite enough. In the end, we decided to just stop trying, and it always made me wonder; what if we lived in California? Most of my family is from there, so it's kind of ironic that we would be the ones out east.

There are reasons, of course, to not legalize marijuana. It is a drug, like any, and all drugs are bad in one way or another. My question to you all is this; why is it any different than a drug you would buy for a cough, or a bad headache? Why is it any different than all the concoctions of alcohol we as Americans consume every day? Every drug is a win-lose deal. You take some, you give some. The only real difference is that this drug comes from the earth. It's organic, just like the produce you pay two extra bucks for at Kroger. Just like these parents thought: If it can help, why can't we just try?