Friday, April 14, 2017

Commentary of Texas and Marijuana

I agree with Alfredo Del La Cruz’s commentary titled Texas and Marijuana. He did a great job in pointing out that although there has not been much success in getting the Republican party to legalize any use of marijuana in Texas, there is now a bit of hope since a member of the Republican party has introduced a bill that decriminalizes low-volume possession of marijuana. I agree that although this is just one bill by the Republican party it is still a step in the direction of getting the Republican party in on a discussion of the potential benefits of legalizing marijuana.

Texas government has received many budget cuts due to the need to decrease spending and with the profit information provided in Alfredo's commentary, it is obvious that Texas has the opportunity to increase funding for programs within our state if our state legalized marijuana in some form. As for his comments on the legalization of marijuana helping to fix Texas's criminal reform the only point really made were that this would benefit the individual facing charges. I would add that legalization of marijuana would also benefit the state by decreasing the amount of money Texas has to spend on the proceedings of these types of cases. Alfredo also pointed out that marijuana has proven to be beneficial for many medical purposes such as the spread of cancer cells. This is an extremely important point to make because many American's have witnessed family, friends or maybe even themselves go through the suffering of these diseases so, in my opinion, this point alone justifies the need for our state to highly consider medical marijuana. 

Alfredo's commentary justified the need for Texas to consider legalizing marijuana in some form. These justifications were made by explaining the financial benefit to our state by increasing profit, the Texas residence's benefit by decreasing the burden for the procession of small amounts of marijuana, as well as the health benefit to Texas residence.