|
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.”
One student 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.” Political science freshman Veronica Stetter, SAFER’s San Diego State
spokesperson, passed out fliers, held up posters and rallied students
for her cause.
“I’m trying to get an official campus organization set up, I’m on
Facebook with it,” Stetter said. “SAFER sent me some materials and I’m
going to give them to President Stephen L. Weber. It’s a book written
by one of the co-founders of SAFER and also a piece of paper that
contains the emerald initiative, which is the plan for colleges to
lessen punishments (for marijuana offenses on college campuses).” Although the event’s turnout was small, Stetter said she believes the
organization has a presence on campus and is looking to expand next
year’s event.
In 2008, the Amethyst Initiative, a statement signed by 135 chancellors
and presidents of colleges across the U.S., invited debate about
changing the current drinking age because of the persistence of
drinking problems on campuses. In response, SAFER has created the
Emerald Initiative to encourage college administrations to allow
students to use marijuana more “freely,” which the group said could
result in fewer students engaging in dangerous drinking. Thirteen campuses nationwide have adopted SAFER referendums and
measures, including Ohio State, George Washington University and the
University of Maryland.
“Well for one, nobody can O.D. on marijuana … I’ve had friends that
have had to go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, and I’ve had
alcohol poisoning myself, it’s just a lot more dangerous,” biology
freshman Cameron Blackburn said. “Humans have used alcohol for several thousand years, making custom,
not consideration, the basis for its legal and social acceptance,” SDSU
psychology professor Robert McGivern said. “It’s hard to imagine
getting FDA approval today for alcohol as a non-prescription drug if it
had been newly discovered in the past century.”
Still, recent studies in both animals and humans show that chronic,
high-level marijuana use in adolescence and young adulthood impairs the
normal development of attention and memory systems, and even when
individuals stop using, the impairments can persist for years
afterward. “This is one area where marijuana’s long-term effects appear to be
worse than those of alcohol, because alcohol impairments in heavy
drinking adolescents are reversible if the individual stops drinking,”
McGivern said. “An argument relying primarily on the fact that
marijuana is better / safer than alcohol as a basis for legalization is
specious at best.”
The event runs congruently with National Alcohol Awareness Month. “The goal is to just educate people and I guess we go to a kind of
party school, we have that reputation, but there are obviously safer
alternatives out there and we just want to educate people about it,”
Stetter said. |
