An endless stream of people kept coming to Hempfest on Saturday. The event continues Sunday at Myrtle Edwards Park, Elliott Bay Park and the Olympic Sculpture Park.

To give Seattle's annual marijuana festival a more polished, professional look, Hempfest director Vivian McPeak tamed his dreadlocks Saturday, pulling them into a ponytail and topping them with a hat. McPeak and his hairstyle are responding to a culture shift at Hempfest, in its 18th year in Seattle.

At the first Hempfest in 1991, 500 protesters gathered at Volunteer Park to push a fringe political agenda.

But this year, scheduled speakers include Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata and state Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland.

A controversial new movement promotes pot use instead of alcohol. These parents want to ban pot prohibition because they believe it will save lives.

Alcohol and marijuana are the two most popular -- and easily accessible -- substances on college campuses, but they're not treated the same under the law. Possessing pot can land you in jail, but drinking too much at a keg party can kill you. "This highlights the absurdity in how we treat these two substances," said Mason Tvert, the co-founder and executive director of the group Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, or SAFER. Mason has made it his personal mission to debunk the government's anti-marijuana message. "The fact that we have students drinking themselves to death made us realize we had to start some awareness on college campuses," says Mason.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 20,000 Americans die every year as a result of drinking too much. It's a tragedy that Mason narrowly escaped. He nearly died from an alcohol overdose in the summer of 2000. The high school senior guzzled beer all day at a country music festival in Arizona. "Beer was widely available, and my friends gave it to me," recalls Mason. Paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, where doctors pumped his stomach. Mason's mother didn't know what happened to her son until the next day, because he was 18 years old and the hospital was not required to notify his parents. "He could have died -- I was so worried about that," said Diane Tvert. As a practicing physical therapist, Diane is supportive of her son's efforts to dispel marijuana myths. "I would so much rather he smoke pot than drink and get behind the wheel of a car," said Diane.

Many like-minded moms share her opinion. "I want my children to grow up to believe that laws are just and rational, and if there's injustice, they should fight it," said Jessica Peck Corry, a Denver-based Republican political strategist. Jessica, a former GOP candidate for state senate, is also a cannabis activist who campaigned for a ballot initiative that would decriminalize marijuana possession in Colorado. "We can no longer afford to wage war on a substance that people can grow in their backyard. It's a war we can't win," says Jessica. As a mother of two young children, Jessica says she plans to have an open dialogue with her kids about drug and alcohol use, even though, she says, "I want to place them in this bubble where I can protect them." Jessica believes that by arming her daughters with accurate information, "they will respect their bodies and make good decisions." These moms insist they're not pushing their kids to abuse drugs, but prefer they choose the lesser of two evils. "Things have gotten so skewed. People look at pot like it's the bogeyman. It's not going to kill you; alcohol can kill you," said Diane.

When Michael Phelps partied at the University of South Carolina last November, he was reportedly slamming beers and acting obnoxious. But it was smoking marijuana out of a bong that got him suspended from swimming and dropped by sponsors. In the forthcoming book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?, authors Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert wonder if our country has it all backwards.

You can read an excerpt from the book, which comes out in September, on Alternet. In it, the authors point out that the Phelps bong photos hit the web on Super Bowl Sunday, as millions of Americans were drinking beers and watching beer commercials on TV — activities that are expected and encouraged.

Marijuana Is Safer looks at the laws governing both substances and attempts to shatter many of the myths associated with marijuana use. When you consider alcoholism and drunk driving, not to mention revenue that legalizing marijuana could bring, do you think our country has it backwards? Which substance do you think is safer?

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.