Do you think smoking marijuana can cause someone to commit crime?
We all know that buying, selling and using marijuana is in itself illegal, and thousands of arrests are made each year to combat this problem. However, does marijuana lead to other crimes as well? According to a recent study, it just might.
Currently there are hundreds of pieces of literature that discuss the relationship between drugs and crime, yet most of those articles are concerned with drugs other than marijuana, such as cocaine, heroin and alcohol. One study, however, looked at marijuana exclusively and found there was a “very strong relationship between marijuana use and the commission of a number of different crimes.”
A Quick Note about Violent Crime
Prior research into marijuana use has often concluded that marijuana lessens the tendency to be aggressive, but as these studies become more advanced we are beginning to see that long-term marijuana use, because of its tendency to produce undesired mental effects, may indeed lead to violent behavior.
Furthermore, close to 50 percent of violent juvenile offenders consistently te gras online kaufen st positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Marijuana and Crime
Marijuana is a crime in itself. Each year, millions of dollars and resources are used to patrol, arrest, trial and detain offenders who are either buying or selling marijuana. Pro-legalization advocates often cite these economic statistics and claim it is reason number one why marijuana should be legalized.
What these advocates fail to mention, however, is the link between marijuana and other crimes committed, and what effect legalization would actually have on the overall crime rate.
In the United States alone, 60 percent of all arrestees in the past five years tested positive for marijuana in urine tests, and while this data may be a bit misleading in terms of a direct causal link (marijuana can remain in the system for up to 3 months) it gives you an idea about the effects of marijuana on our society.
There is really no way to prove for certain that marijuana, or any other drug for that matter, directly leads to crime, but with these type of statistics listed below, it’s fairly easy to make educated inferences.
Marijuana is often the drug of choice for people who claim gang membership, and over 50 percent of all gang arrestees self report that they had used marijuana within 3 days before the time of their arrest. These gangs account for a large portion of both violent and non-violent crime in the United States.
Marijuana is the most widely used drug in the US, and statistically, those who use marijuana on a regular basis are 30 percent more likely to be arrested than non-users.
Over 25 percent of convicted murderers admit to a marijuana drug habit at the time of their crime.
Marijuana users often commit income and property related crime as a method for attaining resources to fund their drug habit. Not to the level of over addictive drugs like heroin, but it still occurs and is hard to overlook.
Marijuana is a contributing factor in almost 30 percent of auto-related accidents and fatalities.
Proponents of marijuana legalization want us to believe that legalizing this drug will help to alleviate crimes of this nature, but it’s very difficult to predict the actual effect legalization will have. It will almost certainly lead to an increased number of people using, which in turn may lead to more violence and more crime.