A friend at a party gets sexually violated by someone who has been
using pot, a family member is killed by a high driver or a schoolmate
is beaten by her father every night after he smokes a joint.
Wait
a second; that does not sound right. Substitute alcohol for marijuana
in all of those situations and you will have something closer to the
actual picture.
That is the message that the executive director
of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), Mason Tvert,
wishes policymakers would get. He said that compared to alcohol,
marijuana is “less toxic, less addictive and associated with far fewer
social problems, especially on campus.”
So why is alcohol freely available to all adults while marijuana is still prohibited at every level of government?
Surely
it must be the more dangerous substance and legalizing it would be
disastrous for the national health and moral fiber. Well, not so
fast—let us look at the facts.
Harry Anslinger, First
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, said when marijuana
was banned it was considered “an addictive drug which produces in its
users insanity, criminality and death.”
Marijuana does none of
those things. According to a 2001 study by the Center for Disease
Control, there were no documented cases of death by marijuana overdose.
Dr.
Leslie Iversen, an Oxford professor, said cannabis is one of the safest
drugs in terms of its long-term health effects. According to SAFER,
marijuana is widely considered to cause less dependence and elicits
fewer withdrawal symptoms than heroin, cocaine, nicotine, alcohol and
even caffeine.
Marijuana is rarely, if ever, linked with unwanted
sexual activity or date rape, both of which are crimes of concern to
students who live on campus.
In contrast, according to a study by
the Harvard School of Public Health, “nearly three-quarters of
(college) rapes happened when the victims were so intoxicated (with
alcohol) they were unable to consent or refuse.”
Alcohol, a
substance legal for adult use and readily available on your average
college campus, is more addictive and more harmful over time and
incites far more violent criminality than marijuana.
However, government and university policies subject marijuana use to drastically harsher policies than alcohol.
Marijuana
is not “the devil’s weed,” but we persist in our expensive and
counterproductive war on pot. We should not retain a policy that allows
nothing but alcohol as a legal intoxicant when there is a safer
alternative available.
How many more lives would be saved from
alcohol poisoning; how many more victims would avoid date rape and how
many wives and children would never know the smack of drunken fists?
For more information, visit saferchoice.org.
