Medical Marijuana

My visual rhetoric assignment was done on legalizing medical marijuana, a substance that, when used for its chemical extracts, can be very beneficial in helping many medical problems. It’s not legal largely because of its potential risks and potential abuse by patients, but that same argument can be made for every other drug prescribed – there are side effects, and drug abuse and OD’s are always an issue.

My original idea for the assignment actually dealt with education and increasing the efficiency of it to match other countries by removing unnecessary courses and only requiring those applicable to one’s future career. I then scratched that idea as it was actually pretty complicated seeing as foreign countries have all sorts of different systems.

Then I changed it to pro-choice for abortion. I was pretty sure about sticking with this idea until it came down to formulating an actual piece of visual rhetoric. Turns out, there’s not really an easy way to use visual rhetoric to support pro-choice ideology. Finding the right picture or image or video would be hard, especially since I wanted to focus on cases of rape and unwanted pregnancies. I didn’t want the picture to be unappealing or come off as harsh, so many options actually got ruled out because of that.

I then finally changed it to something dealing with marijuana legalization. At first I wanted to do something funny like make a reference to Pineapple Express, but then I realized that not only would people probably not get the reference, but it also wouldn’t be rhetorically powerful enough to convey a message, and people probably wouldn’t take it seriously anyway after seeing a picture of Seth Rogan and James Franco. But then I focused on specifically medical marijuana, which was much easier to do because creating a visual instance of sympathy through say, a cancer patient, is always rhetorically powerful.