In his column, featured in the Wall Street Journal, "A Doctor's Case for Legal Pot," psychiatrist David L. Nathan of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School discusses how society should be "far more concerned about booze than marijuana."

In most of my substance-abuse patients, I am far more concerned about their consumption of booze than pot. Alcohol frequently induces violent or dangerous behavior and often-irreversible physiological dependence; marijuana does neither. Chronic use of cannabis raises the risk of lung cancer, weight gain, and lingering cognitive changes—but chronic use of alcohol can cause pancreatitis, cirrhosis and permanent dementia. In healthy but reckless teens and young adults, it is frighteningly easy to consume a lethal dose of alcohol, but it is almost impossible to do so with marijuana. Further, compared with cannabis, alcohol can cause severe impairment of judgment, which results in greater concurrent use of hard drugs.

Dr. Nathan certainly has a little more research to do -- particularly with regard to his eroneous assertion that marijuana contributes to lung cancer -- but all in all he hits the nail on the head.