Think Pot's More Dangerous Than Alcohol? Prove It

One could be forgiven for thinking alcohol’s safer than pot; after all, the federal government classifies marijuana right alongside heroin as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value, while it’s hard to drive down any street in America without passing by at a half-dozen pubs and liquor stores. Now one group of activists has issued a challenge: if you think pot’s so bad, well, prove it. And if you do, there’s a $10,000 check with your name on it.

Sponsored by the Safer Texas Campaign, a group that maintains pot is safer than alcohol and that the nation’s laws should reflect that, the “$10k Texas Challenge” asks pot critics to disprove, using peer-reviewed studies, “three statements of fact that demonstrate that marijuana is objectively and unquestionably safer than alcohol”:

1. Alcohol is significantly more toxic than marijuana, making death by overdose far more likely with alcohol.
2. The health effects from long-term alcohol consumption cause tens of thousands of more deaths in the U.S. annually than the health effects from the long-term consumption of marijuana.
3. Violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by alcohol is far more prevalent in the U.S. than violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by marijuana only.

If you’re planning on financing that dream vacation by winning the challenge, though, think again. To say that an overdose is “far more likely” with alcohol than with pot is actually a gross understatement: there has never been a recorded instance of someone dying from ingesting marijuana. By contrast, more than 23,000 people died in 2007 from alcohol-related causes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including more than 14,000 who died as a result of alcohol-induced liver disease.

A study published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet, meanwhile, finds that alcohol is nearly four times worse for both user and society as a whole than marijuana. In fact, alcohol is “more harmful than heroin,” according to study co-author David Nutt, who was the top drug adviser for the British government until he was fired last year for questioning the scientific basis -- or lack thereof -- for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's move to "get tougher" on drugs.

"Our findings lend support to previous work in the U.K. and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm,” the study says, according to areport from the BBC.

No wonder, then, that Safer Texas Campaign coordinator Craig Johnson is so confident his group’s $10,000 offer “will not be claimed.”

“Marijuana is objectively and unquestionably less harmful than alcohol,” he notes on the group's website. “Alcohol is more toxic than marijuana, more likely to lead to the death of the user -- either by overdose or chronic use -- and more likely to contribute to violence.”

The goal isn’t to ban alcohol, though; the U.S. experiment with prohibition in the 1920s pretty clearly demonstrated the futility of trying that. And in moderation, studies show alcohol can actually be good for the heart, and the majority of people drink responsibly, though you might not get that impression watching the shirtless guys with letters painted on their chests at a college football game. Instead, the goal is simply to have drug policies that recognize the prohibition of drugs and alcohol has been a failure wherever it's been tried, and that a legal, regulated market is a much more effective means of addressing the problems associated with drug use -- many of which are actually caused by their illegality (you don't see cartels selling Bud Light, nor do you see alcohol companies, as bad as they may be, lacing their product with cancer drugs).

Removing the penalties associated with using marijuana and other illicit drugs is not to say everyone should go out and get high. And a new study in the British Journal of Criminology shows most people wouldn't, as while a few ineffective laws might be taken off the books, the power of social stigma -- which is much more effective at discouraging drug use than any silly statute -- would remain in place. Indeed, after examining Portugal's decade-long experiment with complete drug decriminalization, the study's authors found that, "contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding."

Photo Credit: The McClouds