April is Alcohol Awareness Month and I found it fitting in Tuesday’s issue of TNH to read an article explaining “drunken etiquette.” It got me thinking: nobody wants find themselves belligerently drunk in front of a UNH police officer, nobody wants to do something stupid that could endanger themselves or people around them but that’s what alcohol does.

Lowering inhibitions and forgetting the problems of the school week just for a night is what college students do best, but what if we could use a substance to “party” that would save us from being tackled on the spot for stumbling on that walk to Wildcat? What if we had a safer way to party that didn’t induce violence, sexual assault or property damage like alcohol does? According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Task Force on College Drinking, each year the use of alcohol by college students contributes to approximately 1,700 student deaths, 600,000 unintentional student injuries, 695,000 assaults involving students, and 97,000 sexual assaults and date rapes involving students. Fortunately, use of cannabis has never been considered a factor in violent crime or sexual assaults.

Even though alcohol is lawfully prohibited for half of us at UNH, we all know someone who can take a stroll downtown to help out a friend. In reality, the prohibition of alcohol for those of us under 21 is not working. It’s not stopping us from drinking and it’s not stopping us from getting arrested for it. Cannabis is lawfully prohibited for everyone; nobody can buy it in a store and it’s strictly enforced, yet it’s the most widely-used illegal drug in the country.

Imagine if every instance of alcohol use on campus was replaced with cannabis use over the past year. Would we have seen the brutal assault on a student during Halloween night last semester? Would we have seen such lengthy police logs after homecoming, or any other weekend for that matter? Would we have been able to prevent the countless sexual assaults that go on without notice or legal consequences?