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.”

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.

(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.

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.

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.