Tobacco products vs Marijuana
Tobacco products have many negative effects in so many different ways. Tobacco and its products affect and harm the environment that it is grown in and the environment it is consumed in unlike marijuana. As for the consumer of a tobacco product there lives are at risk as well. Tobacco can bring many kinds of medical conditions and cancers which marijuana has been known to cure! On top of tobacco products being harmful, they are also addictive so there effects come quicker. Finally tobacco is the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths a year.
Tobacco products come from the leaves of a tobacco plant. The leaves of this plant contain nicotine, a stimulant of the brain. People have been consuming the tobacco leaf since 1400 B.C., that's more than 3,000 years. When the spanish came to the Americas the Native Americans had already been using tobacco.”Their use was associated with many festive occasions and played important roles in defining and demarcating bonds of sociability.” (Brennan, Tom paragraph 3) Cigarettes were first mass produced in the year 1880 by James Albert Bonsack. Besides cigarettes other ways to consume tobacco are through cigars, chewing tobacco, pipes and hookahs. All of these are recreational uses of tobacco as there are no medical uses for the plant, an advantage that marijuana has.
Marijuana comes from the cannabis plant. It has been used since 950 B.C.. When it was first discovered it was used during religious ceremonies by the ancient Assyrians. Marijuana has been discovered in many other parts of the world including some of the pipes in Shakespeare’s home in Stratford. Marijuana is a psychiatric drug and it has recreational and medical uses. Medically it is legalized in 29 of the 50 United States. As for recreational use marijuana is only legal in eight states. Marijuana is consumed through bongs, hookahs, edibles, creams, tea and vapor. Marijuana is the most common illegal drug in the United States of America. Although tobacco is not illegal, it is very common and it can lead to severe health problems.
The effects of tobacco are very severe especially for people who have been smoking for a long time. Smoking cigarettes can affect your autoimmune system through Chrohns disease, rheumatoid Arthritis and type 2 diabetes.”Smoking has such a devastating effect on the body because cigarette smoke is, in a word, toxic.”(James D. Torr paragraph 2) It can cause high blood pressure and make your blood vessels thicker. There have been cases where smoking has caused osteoporosis and bone loss. Your lungs can end up with pneumonia asthma and tuberculosis. Smoking builds up plaque in your arteries and it can cause strokes, heart attacks, aneurisms and coronary heart disease. Finally it can cause erectile disfunction. This does not even include all the cancers that a person can get from smoking. Unlike tobacco, marijuana has a much smaller list of health problems.
Long term marijuana smoking can lead to causing and wheezing. In some cases signs of Bronchitis have been found. Besides those symptoms that are hardly serious compared to the effects of tobacco smoke, marijuana has benefits! It has been found that smoking marijuana can kill cancer cells. It also can reduce nausea and vomiting of people undergoing chemotherapy. Marijuana also helps reduce muscle spasms and chronic pain of patients. Finally it has been known to improve the appetite of people with HIV or AIDS. Short term some of the effects on the body are redness in the eyes and a dry mouth. Sometimes there will be a hot or cold sensation on the skin and an increased heart rate. Lastly is relaxes the muscles of someone who consumes it.
To add to the effects of tobacco products there is a long list of cancers that can be caused by smoking. Nose, mouth, liver, stomach and bladder cancer just to name a few of the 16 there are. On top of all the cancers smoking can cut off ten years of a person's life if they smoke for a long enough period of time. Also around 500,000 deaths are due to smoking and 40,000 are cause by just being around the smoke. Just like its effects on the human body, tobaccos effects on the environment are also negative.
When it comes to the environment, tobacco has no positive effects. Cigarette butts create over 1.7 billion pounds of toxic waste yearly the doesn’t even account for other tobacco products. These cigarette butts take over 25 years to decompose. Cigarette butts also pollute the air water and land they are near. The factories create pollution that is bad for the environment. Even tobacco smoke has over 4,000 chemicals that are bad for the environment. Packaging cigarettes requires paper products that requires trees to be cut down however, thousands of trees are cut down to make fields to grow tobacco. Then the fields are sprayed with chemicals and pesticides that are bad for the environment so they grow without being affected by bugs or other things that can kill the plants. As for marijuana's effects on the environment, there aren't really any.
In the process of marijuana from growing to being consumed there is no factory involved. Unlike cigarette butts a joint does not have that so there is no potential for it to be thrown on the ground and pollute the environment. If a person were to use a bowl to consume marijuana no trash would be created what so ever except the ashes which are hardly anything. Rolling paper and swishers are natural so they have the potential to decompose quickly if they were thrown out a window or dropped on the ground. Marijuana usually comes in plastic containers that would not be kept on hand so they wouldn’t just get tossed out randomly.
When it comes it comes to the economy tobacco affects everyone that pays taxes. Every year congress spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to go against tobacco advertising through anti tobacco programs. Tobacco companies also receive millions of dollars a year through subsidies from the government. Healthcare also takes care of billions of dollars yearly in bills for patients that are ill due to smoking. In the few states that have legalized marijuana, there have been many benefits for the economy. Through 2014 and 2015 over 30,000 jobs were created only in the state of Colorado. Marijuana sales were also around 1.5 billion dollars. With the state's sales tax being 2.9 percent, that's around 40 million dollars gained just through marijuana sales. In total revenues were around 120 million dollars from marijuana taxes and excise.
Tobacco products have many negative effects in so many different ways in comparison to marijuana. From its its lethal health effects such as type 2 diabetes and asthma, to the list of 16 cancers that can be obtained from smoking cigarettes. Whilst marijuana can kill cancer cells and has medical uses for multiple different conditions including patients undergoing chemotherapy. At the current rate of people using tobacco products around 500,000 lives are being lost a year compared to the zero people who have died from marijuana because it is impossible to overdose on. Marijuana’s economic statistics can easily surpass those of tobacco products given time as they have already surpassed the revenues from selling alcohol in some states.