Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn’t like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don’t know where I’d be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I’ve concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal.
One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.
Tobacco is the second most dangerous drug available to our culture. Number one is alcohol follow by many pharmacy pills. So no, marijuana is not more dangerous then tobacco.
Tobacco has not yet been fully tried before the bar of science. But the tribunal has been prepared and the gathering of evidence has begun and when the final verdict is rendered, it will appear that tobacco is evil and only evil; that as a drug it is far more deadly than alcohol, killing in a dose a thousand times smaller, and that it does not possess a single one of the quasi merits of alcohol.
I'm glad now, at age 66, that I never used alcohol or tobacco... I've buried a lot of friends who used tobacco or alcohol.
While alcohol ... continues to wreak havoc in America, supported by a $6 billion-a-year alcohol industry advertising campaign extolling the joy of inebriation, the far less harmful drug of marijuana remains illegal and continues to ruin people's lives - only if they are caught possessing and convicted of that crime.
If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you'll add eight to 24 years to your life.
If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.
In fact, marijuana lowers your stress level and lowers your body temperature. It actually seems that people live longer if they use it. If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you'll add 24 years to your life.
There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.
So at the end of the day, our number 1 goal, our top priority, is to motivate American youngsters to reject the abuse of illegal drugs, tobacco and alcohol. All three of them are illegal behaviors.
One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop.
But you can count the dead bodies from alcohol, tobacco, and legal pharmaceuticals by the millions.
Alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical drugs are legal, but they can hurt a lot of people.
Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.