It’s a remarkable weekend when one finds the Grey Lady arguing for state’s rights, and worrying huffily about arbitrary Presidential powers. But when it comes to smoking dope, the mind of the New York Times has fully boggled. Against careful science, sound public policy, and even liberal politics that defends the vulnerable, the venerable editors have decided that what America needs now is marijuana, and more of it.

Without a change in federal law, they write, citizens would be “vulnerable to the whims of whoever happens to be in the White House, and chooses to enforce or not to enforce the federal law.” No, they are not talking about the current occupant, who rules like the Red Queen. They are worried that some future president might enforce the law against the trafficking in toxins. Entranced by the specter of Al Capone, the Times embraces the wrong-headed idea that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. There are two problems with this belief: it’s terribly dated. And it is contradicted by any serious consideration of the facts.

One rarely hears a plea for greater marijuana access based solely on an evaluation of its likely impact on public health or crime rates. Instead, there is almost always a pairing with alcohol, a sophistry that makes marijuana appear more safe. The argument’s pairing is revealing. Alcohol, legal for adults, is very widespread, and deeply entrenched in Western history. Marijuana, as a significant substance of use is recent by comparison, and has only a fraction of the prevalence, a fact surely attributable to the disincentives for use contained in its prohibition. The harms of marijuana are controlled by its prohibition and can only be expected to grow rapidly by making marijuana use on a par with alcohol use.

This discussion reveals two things. First, there is a missing argument in the comparison trope, which is that it’s not really about the respective safety of the substances, but about their disparate legal treatment. Drinkers get to enjoy their intoxicant, while marijuana smokers have to fear arrest. This injustice should be rectified by letting marijuana users have their drug under the same terms as alcohol. As we see, if one can’t make a compelling case for marijuana on its merits, at least one can denounce alcohol, cry hypocrisy, and expect parity.

To be fair, there is some measure of academic support for the position concerning alcohol. Professor David Nutt, the former chief drugs advisor to the United Kingdom, published his rank-order of harmful substances in the journal Lancet, in 2010. He claims that in terms of costs to society, alcohol does the “biggest harm.”

Nutt calculated two scores, the “harm to users”, and the “harm to others” based on 16 criteria he developed, and alcohol was the “overall” worst. But what are we to make of the non-obvious realization that, according to Dr. Nutt, alcohol is more damaging than either heroin or cocaine?

Clearly the rankings are being affected by the number of users, which contribute to the overall calculus of “disease burden” for any affliction. Seasonal flu is more common than leprosy. Shall we argue that getting the flu is “worse” than getting leprosy? The same phenomenon affects our alcohol comparison. There are roughly six times as many regular drinkers in America (120 million) than regular users of marijuana (about 19 million), and the damage is a function of these dimensions.

The usual rhetorical trump card for marijuana supporters, however, is the issue of overdose deaths. Excessive alcohol consumption kills. And while deaths from a lethal dose of cannabis consumption do exist (usually cardiac issues), they are rare, and direct lethal toxicity for THC, the psycho-potent ingredient, is widely discounted. (But if dose-lethality were driving public perceptions of harm, it’s hard to understand the posture towards tobacco; a lethal dose of nicotine is possible, but poisoning is found mostly in its use as a pesticide, not common smoking, yet tobacco is widely seen, quite correctly, as a devastating substance.)

for more:
http://www.hudson.org/research/10478-com...juana-seriously

"rules like a Red Queen" is that a reference to Alice in Wonderland or something?

Great line!
"Aren't there enough people stumbling around calling each other "dude"? We think so." William Kristol