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Written by Ashley Morgan
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Tuesday, 13 April 2010 |
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Students argued that drinking alcohol is more harmful than smoking marijuana last Thursday on the Free Speech Steps.
The nonprofit organization Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation
started the project with the purpose of “educating the public about the
relative harms of the nation’s two most popular recreational drugs:
alcohol and marijuana,” according to the group’s Web site. “In
particular, the organization works to highlight the fact that marijuana
is far safer than alcohol both to the consumer and to society.”
Undeclared freshman Colin Brown said the event was intended to “give
information to people about how alcohol can be worse for a person than
marijuana and that we should have the same punishment for alcohol as
marijuana instead of everybody going a little bit more extreme with
marijuana.” |
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Written by Hillary Walton
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Monday, 12 April 2010 |
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UVM members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy joined in a national
Drug Safety Awareness day last week to promote marijuana as a safer
alternative to alcohol.
The organization in charge of the national campaign is called SAFER.
Based out of Denver, Colo., SAFER pushes for a national realization
that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, according to the
organization’s website. “Obviously I’m not trying to force people to do any drug, but to make
it a less biased choice because they really are the two most used
substances, and marijuana is the safer of the two,” junior and
co-president for Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), Brendan
Miller said.
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Written by David Sirota
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Friday, 09 April 2010 |
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(The following column appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Denver Post, the Florida Times-Union, among several other publications nationwide.) When choosing between frugality and security, history shows that
America almost always selects the latter. To paraphrase President
Kennedy, we'll pay any price and bear any burden to protect ourselves.
No doubt this was why the economic case against the Iraq invasion
failed. To many, the war debate seemed to pose a binary question: debt
or mushroom clouds? And when it's a scuffle between money arguments and
security arguments (even dishonest security arguments), security wins
every time.
Call this the Pay-Any-Price Principle — an axiom that has impacted
all of America's wars, and now, most poignantly, its War on Drugs. When
faced with criticism of budget-busting prosecution and incarceration
costs, law enforcement agencies and private prison interests have
successfully depicted their cause as a willingness to pay any price to
jail dealers of hard narcotics.
Of course, data undermine that story line. In 2008, the FBI reported
that 82 percent of drug arrests were for possession — not sales or
manufacturing — and almost half of those arrests were for marijuana, not
hard drugs. |
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Written by Janese Heavin
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Friday, 09 April 2010 |
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University of Missouri students gathered at Speakers Circle
yesterday asking college administrators to stop “driving us to drink.”
The rally was part of a national movement known as SAFER, which
argues that marijuana is a safer — but less accepted — recreational
choice than alcohol.
Scott Lauher, an MU graduate who works with the college’s NORML
chapter, said he has met students who do not smoke weed because they
fear they’ll be arrested or kicked out of residential halls. So
instead, they drink, which is more dangerous, he said. |
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Written by Luke Udstuen
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Friday, 09 April 2010 |
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A group of demonstrators spoke Thursday in Speakers Circle, calling
for students and university administration to reconsider their stances
on marijuana.
Kellie Smith, MU National Organization for the Reformation of
Marijuana Laws president, spoke in response to Alcohol Awareness Month.
She said MU has been driving its students to drink.
According to the Centers for Disease Control Web site, approximately
79,000 deaths each year in the United States can be attributed to
alcohol consumption. Zero occur each year due to marijuana.
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Written by Phil Smith
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Thursday, 08 April 2010 |
Voters in the Rocky
Mountain town of Nederland, Colorado, voted Tuesday to remove all local
penalties for adult marijuana possession. The measure passed with 54% of
the vote in an election that also saw voters oust incumbent Mayor
Martin Cheshes, who had opposed the ballot measure.
"It's a foolish thing to put on the ballot," Cheshes told the Daily Camera in nearby Boulder before the election.
"If it passes, it enhances the reputation of Nederland as a kooky
place, which I don't think we need, and if you're a marijuana advocate,
it leaves the only penalties in place the state penalties, which are
harsher."
Nederland becomes the third Colorado community to vote to legalize
marijuana in the past five years. Denver voters did so in 2005, and the
ski resort town of Breckenridge followed suit last year. |
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