Captital Punishment, a Pseudo-solution

The blog Warning: We Must Save Innocent Lives posits that "The death penalty helps prevent future crime a murder has been deterred from committing more crimes when he is executed." This conclusion was made using data gathered by the Gallup Poll, which is emotionally stemmed fluxuating opinions, and a study more than 20 years old that arbitrarily claims for every execution 18 murders are deterred.
The statement made by the author, "The death penalty prevents murders from murdering again and saves innocent lives and we must choose the option that saves innocent lives," is misleading and no way to be proven. I do agree with the fact that if someone were to be executed they would not be able to murder anybody due to the fact that they would cease to exist, but the claim to know their future intentions is far fetched. There is no way to be sure that someone will take another life again and there is no way to be certain that by executing someone you are saving an "innocent" life. With this idea all one would be achieving is deterring the possibility of one person committing a murder crime.
In the blog Warning: We Must Save Innocent Lives the claim was made that "the death penalty helps prevent future crime." According to www.disastercenter.com/crime/, the statistics do not support this conclusion. This website includes statistics from the year 2007. In 2007 from the 36 states that do enforce the death penalty the average number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants was about 6.2. In 2007 from the 14 states that do not enforce the death penalty the average number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants was about 3.1. According to these statistics capital punishment has very little or no effect as a deterrent.
However, I do agree with the author that feeding the system money for long-term imprisonment is not an effective enough way to deal with murder crimes as a deterrent. I believe there are other successful methods as a means of deterrence such as organizing neighborhood watches and after-school programs for young teens and young adults. Methods of prevention prove to have more effective outcomes than dealing with problems as they come.
Justifiable murders, capital punishment, is not the answer to dealing with murder crimes. All it may do is serve as an irrational quick-fix for the victims unfortunately going through a tragedy.

The Panacea

A timeless, possibly effortless, issue that sparks relevance within the fields of medicine, politics and the economy, and one that President Obama cannot seem to avoid at the moment, is the decriminalization of marijuana. At this point in time, I feel that this argument can be looked upon and solved with the method of choosing between the lesser of two evils. One being to make marijuana a criminal offense and in doing so, inducing the crime rate by possession or drug violence. The other being to legalize as well as place extreme regulations on marijuana usage and possibly see an incline in traffic accidents or other accidents due to reasons assumed to be the cause of increased usage. Both methods have the intention of protecting society from possible harm thought to be associated with the usage of marijuana. Our government currently is in favor of the first option. I am in favor of the latter option.

I feel the medical community would benefit tremendously from the use of marijuana in the treatment process to ease the negative effects of certain ailments, such as cancers. Many patients undergoing chemotherapy as treatment for cancer can experience lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, insomnia, and/or pain. All of these symptoms can make not only the experience more sufferable, but can have the effect of prolonging the healing process. Medicinal marijuana can be specifically engineered to combat all these negative effects.
Dalene Entenmann. Medical marijuana pot pill approved for chemotherapy. The Cancer Blog. May 16, 2006.

I feel that punishing the offenders of marijuana crimes is unnecessarily costly to the government as well as tax payers. The amount of people in American society that partake in marijuana activities has overwhelmingly increased in just 15 years. We know this by the amount of arrests due to marijuana offenses that occurred within 1991 (288,000 arrests), compared to the arrests that happened in 2006 (830,000 arrests). Either Americans became apathetic and conspicuous with their illegal engagements or more of society is now accepting and embracing marijuana. With every arrest money is spent for the police officers' time patrolling, money is spent when processing and booking an offender, money is spent to maintain an offender in jail, and money is spent in an effort to stop the trafficking and using marijuana (the War on Drugs).Paul Armentano. 20 Million Arrests, and Counting. In These Times. September 25, 2008. The campaign for "War on Drugs" has never really been a successful one, only ongoing. In decriminalizing marijuana and placing strict regulations on the possession and/or usage of marijuana not only will the government have more control than they ever have before or will on the movement of marijuana within American society, but the government can make a sufficient amount of money by placing a tax on marijuana similar to the tax on alcohol.