Can a nation drowning in drink return to drug-law sanity?

For a plant that’s never caused a single human death in the tens of thousands of years it’s been with us, marijuana still faces a gargantuan social stigma.

Government propagandists and some social conservatives, in their quest to proscribe our behavior, and consumption, are quick to cite anecdotal evidence and piles of bogus liquor- and prescription-drug-industry-funded studies that warn of the dangers of firing up even that first joint.

Yet these crusaders invariably fail to cite a little thing we call the truth: That alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs kill or maim hundreds of thousands of Americans each year while marijuana kills, oh, no one; that marijuana – still this nation’s leading cash crop, with estimated sales of $35.8 billion in 2006 – was legal in this country until almost 1940 (long after Prohibition had come and gone); that legalizing, and taxing, the sale of a plant that’s been legal for most of our history could help pull state governments, including Nevada’s, out of recent budgetary sink holes; that’s it not the government’s (or anyone else’s) business to tell Americans what they can and cannot put into their own bodies.

Luckily, a growing number of legal, medical and policy experts are changing perceptions through the intellectual and logical force of their arguments that the time has come to re-examine and change our failed drug policies. Policies which will cost us more than $15 billion this fiscal year alone.

Steve Fox, director of State Campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project (the nation's largest organization dedicated to reforming marijuana laws) is one such expert. A former congressional lobbyist and a longtime proponent of sanity in public policy, Fox recently spent some time with CityLife talking about his new book Marijuana is Safer and to hash out and contrast the relative harms, and legal status, of this nation’s two most popular recreational substances: alcohol and marijuana.

The student union at Oaksterdam University in downtown Oakland was buzzing yesterday afternoon as several dozen people gathered together with Marijuana is Safer authors Paul Armentano of NORML and Mason Tvert of SAFER to celebrate the brand new book's release. (Co-author Steve Fox of MPP was on the East Coast. The book also boasts a foreword by Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle.)

After an hour or so of schmoozing, book selling, and signing, Armentano and Tvert were joined by Oaksterdam's Greg Grimala for an informal discussion about the book, whose thesis--that marijuana is safer than alcohol--is an outgrowth of work originally done by Tvert as he organized college campuses around the issue of inequality in punishments for students got smoking pot as opposing to underage drinking. Armentano, who has been keeping a keen eye on marijuana research for years, supplies much of the hard science.