Marijuana Is Safer: Not a Good Book. A Great Book.

I just recently started watching the HBO show The Wire (I know, I know). One sentiment expressed by one of the police officer characters (sorry, I don’t have their names memorized yet) stuck with me. He said, the phrase “War on Drugs” is a misnomer. Why? Well… wars end.

Wars end. When will the federal government end the “War on Drugs”? When will they admit it’s unwinnable and try adopting a new strategy—namely, decriminalization? When will they give adults the choice: a dangerous, potentially lethal substance (alcohol), or a relatively benign one (marijuana)?

StoptheDrugWar.org delves into these question in their recent review of Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert.

In the past few years, Colorado-based activist Mason Tvert has taken the notion of comparing marijuana to alcohol and used it to great success, first in organizing college students around equalizing campus penalties for marijuana and underage drinking infractions (marijuana offenses are typically punished more severely), then in running a successful legalization initiative in Denver in 2005. Tvert and his organization, SAFER (Safer Alternatives for Enjoyable Recreation), continue to hammer away at marijuana prohibition, and now, in collaboration with NORML analyst Paul Armentano and MPP director for state campaigns Steve Fox, he has taken his “marijuana is safer” campaign to a new level — and, hopefully, to a new and broader audience.

Having known (and repeatedly interviewed) all three coauthors in the course of my duties for the Drug War Chronicle, I assumed “Marijuana Is Safer” would be a good book. I was mistaken. It’s a great book, and an extremely useful one. “Marijuana Is Safer” starts out hitting on all eight cylinders with a foreword from former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper and never lets up. It hits its points concisely and engagingly, it is thoroughly researched, and its political arguments are carefully thought out.

Regular readers of the Chronicle may not expect to learn a lot that they didn’t know already, but they will likely be surprised, especially when it comes to the deleterious effects of alcohol. Did you know about the nasty effects of acetaldehyde? I didn’t. It’s what you get when you metabolize ethanol (alcohol), and it’s carcinogenic and damages internal organs. Because it is so damaging, the body breaks it down into acetate, but if you’re drinking at the rate of more than a drink an hour, you’re body starts lagging behind. Something to keep in mind the next time someone invites you to join a drinking contest.

Similarly, you may share the general conviction that alcohol use can lead to violence, disease, crime, and accidents, but “Marijuana Is Safer” offers up the hard numbers — complete with footnotes. Here’s just one hard number: 35,000. That’s the number of deaths each year attributed to chronic alcohol consumption. We all know what the number of deaths attributed to chronic use of the chronic is, don’t we? That’s right, zero.

Armentano, Fox and Tvert offer a mix of history, science, medicine, media critique, and just plain straight talk as they survey the history of alcohol and marijuana use in America, discuss the differing attitudes toward the two drugs, explain the rise of marijuana prohibition, and, most centrally, compare and contrast the effects of the two drugs on individual consumers and society as a whole.

They also dissect the arguments that legalizers have used — so far, unsuccessfully — to try to end marijuana prohibition. While those arguments are perfectly valid, the coauthors argue that they cannot counter the objection of people who might otherwise be persuaded: Why should we legalize another vice?

Naturally enough, Armentano, Fox and Tvert have the answer: “We would not be adding a vice; we would be allowing adults the option to choose a less harmful alternative for relaxation and recreation,” they write.

Read the whole article here.