Assignment 4 - Tahsen Hossain - Weed

My family is altogether leaning toward the left side of the political spectrum. However, we are just far away from each other to get into arguments about politics. Our most recent skirmish occurred over the legalisation of recreational marijuana and decriminalisation of minor drug use.

Having done my own personal research on the subject because it is a popular debate topic in KYA, I was for legalisation because it would likely help decrease the stigma around addiction and let those people who want and need help dealing with addiction to approach their options without feeling threatened by the police. I also thought it would help if the levels of THC (the addictive chemical component) and CBD (the therapeutic component) could be put under government regulations that addiction could be reduced and marijuana would no longer have to be the gate-way drug that it is often claimed to be.

For some context, my mother is a nurse and my father, a pharmacist, so this would directly affect them.

However, this makes it very hard to argue anything with them on the subject because, as you are likely to have realised, I am an unemployed highschooler, which discounts any credibility I could have in the argument (at least for them).

My mother is avidly against legalisation and my father took my side of the argument. And midway through the discussion, I was no longer a participant. My father made a few points, then got sleepy and went to bed. And for the remainder of the time, we entered a war of attrition. The winner determined by who could last the longest listening to the other talk. I was not allowed to speak as my mother was lecturing me about not doing drugs. By the time dinner was finished, I had determined that I did not have the ability to convince my mother at the time so I withdrew my troops from the field and retreated to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

I briefly entertained the notion that I might be wrong, but after examining my mother's argument I still thought that mine made more sense. My mother's argument consisted mostly of her own experiences with addiction which were limited to treating severely addicted patients. Thus, it made perfect sense that she would extrapolate those experiences to form a negative opinion on drugs as a whole and be swayed to ignore the nuances of my argument and simplify it down to taking illegal drugs is bad and not doing so is good. And while nurses play a pivotal role in treating addiction they aren't the only opinions that matter. 

The only outcome of this argument was my own feeling of annoyance. What makes the outcome so annoying you ask? I was the only one in my house that had actually surveyed several sources from both sides and researched it and yet what I had to say was entirely overruled because I'm simply not old enough.