|
Written by SAFER
|
|
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 |
|
SAFER's Mason Tvert was a featured guest on MarijuanaRadio.com last night, discussing the new book he co-authored, Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?
CLICK HERE to listen to the show!
|
|
|
Written by David Luhrssen
|
|
Friday, 31 July 2009 |
Alcohol fuels violence and pot does not. That's at the core of the argument in the self-explanatory Marijuana is Safer:So Why Are Driving People to Drink?
(published by Chelsea Green). Authors Steve Fox, Paul Armentano and
Mason Tvert are marijuana reform activists with a professed agenda.
Their position is buttressed in the foreword, where Norm Stamper,
former Seattle police chief, takes up their case. In his experience,
cops are forced to respond to booze-induced fighting nightly. Pot
violence? Never heard of it.
If the purpose of law is to prevent people from
harming each other, then the preponderance of anecdote and evidence is
on the side of the authors. Also, the old argument that pot "leads" to
harder drugs is specious because nicotine or alcohol, not marijuana,
are usually the first drugs Americans ingest, yet the expensive and
failed War on Drugs continues to be waged. Pot smoking as an adolescent
right of passage hasn't stunted the careers of more recent generations
of professionals. Barack Obama was candid about pot in his youth. So
was Newt Gingrich. |
|
|
Written by SAFER
|
|
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 |
|
|
|
|
Written by Jason Whited
|
|
Thursday, 06 August 2009 |
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. |
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
|
| Results 31 - 35 of 164 |