Wednesday, January 6

Alcohol is legal, pot is not: which is 'safer'?

For my first post, I will address an obvious hypocrisy in America...the fact that alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. Amid current debate regarding the legalization of marijuana for public consumption we find those who like to resort to the "safety" argument.

The "safety" argument is a very popular form of argumentation used by people who have no real reason with valid points to support a conclusion to which he or she has drawn. As the argument goes, folks say something like "we should not make marijuana legal for the safety of everyone because it hurts people" or "it is not safe to make marijuana legal because we don't want crime to go up, since it will if pot is legal..." so on and so forth.

These people tend to make claims with little support, irrelevant support or no support at all. In other words, they are talking out of their ass. A short scan of the internet regarding deaths in the United States will reveal, for example, that in 2000 85,000 people died from alcohol related deaths. An additional 16,653 people died from drunk drivers. Thus, at least 100,000 people died due to alcohol that year...on first glance.

How many people died in 2000 due to marijuana? A big whopping 0. Yes, folks, that's not an "o" but rather a zero.

Here again our illogical friends may go ahead and attempt to argue that the reason the number is zero is because less people smoke pot than drink alcohol. Quite unfortunately for them, the reason the number is zero has nothing to do with the percentage of the population who consume marijuana but rather from the fact that marijuana as a drug is far less dangerous than alcohol as a drug. Do I need to point out that 17.6 million Americans are alcoholics? (I'll go into detail about this topic in a separate blog.)

The purpose of this post is simply to show how the "safety" argument against the legalization of pot does not work. It is overwhelmingly clear that alcohol consumption is less "safe" in terms of crime and personal well-being than marijuana consumption. People don't die from an overdose of pot; they do die from an overdose of alcohol or from asphyxiation (vomit from too much booze cutting off air supply while asleep ). Not to mention crime would actually go down if pot were legal, since all those who would be arrested for marijuana possession and distribution would not be arrested anymore.

Perhaps our law enforcement agency should spend more time arresting drunk drivers than arresting pot smokers. This would actually make our society "safer" since less drunk drivers would be killing people.

So, we wonder- would our society really be less safe if marijuana were legal? Like, really?

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