HS Essay/Persuasive Writing examples

Berenson, Alex. “Legalizing pot fraught with ills.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 Jan. 2019, p.C1.

Ten states have already legalized marijuana, with New York and New Jersey working towards legalizing marijuana for recreational use. In this article, Alex Berenson tries to explain to his readers the repercussions we as a PA community might face if our state legalizes marijuana. Legalized marijuna has many supporters across the nation. These supporters argue that pot is harmless, it has been proven to treat some diseases, and there is no link between pot and crime. After extensive research into the issues, the author realized that those arguments and assumptions are not necessarily true. 

The author's thesis clearly stated in paragraph five says, “Legalizing it for recreational use is almost certain to cause mental illness and violence to rise.” Relying on different medical studies and the perspective and real-world experience of his wife, a psychiatrist who works with mentally ill violent offenders, Berenson uncovered the link that researchers made between marijuana and “psychosis”, a severe medical condition that includes patients suffering from a break from reality, paranoia, and delusions. Shocked and skeptical initially, Berenson listened closely when his wife told him that almost all her patients had used marijuana at some point in their criminal career.

Berenson also found studies that specifically linked the drug to “schizophrenia”, which is a serious mental illness that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. In the article, he identified a prominent study conducted by the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 that highlighted the “evidence reviewed by the committee suggests that cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, other psychoses, and social anxiety disorders, and to a lesser extent, depression.” To provide even more evidence, Berenson noted that “cannibis psychosis is a recognized medical term” and marijuana “dispensaries”, legal outlets for selling or dispensing marijuana, deliberately advertise some strains as less likely to cause paranoia. 

Although the thesis is not explicitly restated throughout the article, the author relates back to it at the end and provides a warning, saying, “Marijuana’s risks are different from opioids, but they are no less real. Lawmakers ought to remember that truth as they listen to advocates promising that legalization will do no harm.” 

I don't have much of an opinion on this at my age. I do not have access to pot, and I don't think I know people that smoke it, although I do believe the author when he says there are real risks because he backed it up with firm evidence. One thing I do know is that marijuana is a multi-million dollar business. I believe that when it comes to making money or doing something for the good of society, corporations will mostly always choose money and will often lie or deceive the public. For example, tobacco companies lied to us about cigarettes not being dangerous and oil and gas companies lied to us about climate change not being real. Marijuana has already been legalized in some states and those companies and states are making a lot of money. I believe that the states currently considering legalization, like PA, are more focused on revenue rather than public health. 

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Oxman, David. “Does active shooter training do more harm than good?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 Jan 2022, p.E5.

David Oxman believes there is something irregular in his current workplace education modules. His employer, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, asks their employees to complete annual online courses. The author thinks most of these courses are “well intentioned and of marginal benefit.” However, one mandatory training stands out that Oxman has been unwilling to complete. Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is now asking their employees to complete a training from the Department of Homeland Security called “Run, Hide, and Fight: Surviving an Active Shooter Event.”

Oxman’s thesis comes towards the end of the article in paragraph seven, where he states that he is worried that “these training videos shift our focus to managing, rather than preventing, a shooting in the first place. And I worry that when training videos on surviving a workplace shooting become as routine as videos about hand-washing and billing, each year the unspeakably abnormal becomes, little by little, just a bit more normal.” He supports this thesis in a few different ways throughout the article. In one place, he notes how mass shootings are normalized by including survival trainings with every day “nuisance” trainings such as medical radiation safety and billing compliance. In another, he compares it to a film he saw in the 1950’s called “Duck and Cover” where children were told to hide under their desks from a nuclear attack. The author points out it’s abnormal to think that “a few inches of wood will somehow protect them from thermonuclear blast.”

One strong point that Oxman makes is that the “Duck and Cover” film did not prevent nuclear war. It was “diplomacy and disarmament guided by leaders that understood the true calamity of nuclear war that made the threat recede.” His use of the word “diplomacy”, or the skill of conducting negotiations, combined with “disarmament”, meaning to divest of arms, highlights the two steps we could take today to address too many guns and too many mass shootings. And I think it is fitting that he uses the carefully chosen word “ominous” to describe the foreshadowing evil of a workplace shooting.

Oxman makes an obvious comparison between the “Duck and Cover” film and the training module. You cannot hide from a nuclear blast under a desk and a workplace training module on surviving an active shooter event probably won’t save your life. And I agree with him that a training that makes people think they can manage or survive a mass shooting does more harm than good. We should not normalize mass shootings and we should not put the responsibility for surviving them on everyday people like you and me. We should use diplomacy to get laws in place that ban assault rifles and require background check and permits, and we should use disarmament to get as many weapons as we can off the street and prevent mass shootings. 

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