Logan Ramsey
Associate Editor
Recreational and medical marijuana is looking like it’s on track to becoming legal in all 50 states. More and more states legalize it every year, but there’s still holdouts all over the country and Idaho is one of these holdouts.
It doesn’t look like marijuana will be legalized in Idaho anytime soon, considering how different the attitude towards it is here compared to the rest of the country. I feel like it’s obvious that medical marijuana should at least be in practice, but when I talk to older and more traditional Idahoans, they seem to think that it’s the devil’s lettuce and won’t touch the topic with a 10-foot pole.
The part about this that makes the least amount of sense to me is that marijuana itself is much safer than one substance that was illegal in the 1920s – alcohol.
When not looking at the medicinal qualities marijuana offers, but only with risks to health and safety, it’s clear that marijuana is a far safer substance than alcohol.
In a review published in a medical journal called The Lancet, it was found that the leading risk of death in 2016 for ages 15 to 49 worldwide was alcohol, which is legal if you are over 21.
That finding is staggering when you consider how often marijuana kills people.
According to the CDC, counting drinking-related accidents and homicides, 90,000 people in the United States died from alcohol-related deaths. Now compare that to cannabis. There are no documented cases of deaths by marijuana overdose.
And according to a 16-year study of 65,000 people published in The American Journal of Public Health, healthy marijuana smokers aren’t more likely to die earlier than non-smokers.
Alcohol is caloric and linked to weight gain as well, while marijuana isn’t. Marijuana users don’t even generally have higher body mass indexes than non-smokers, despite smokers getting the ‘munchies.’
And even more than weight gain, alcohol intake is linked to developing breast cancer. Marijuana was initially thought to be linked to lung cancer, but that has been debunked, and it’s not connected to any increase in cancer.
Marijuana use is even less addictive than alcohol.
In a 1994 survey, epidemiologists at The National Institute on Drug Abuse surveyed 8,000 people from ages to 15 to 64 and only nine percent became addicted to marijuana, while 15 percent became addicted to alcohol. The only time you ever see marijuana cause destruction in someone’s life is if it segways as a gateway drug into harder substances, but that doesn’t happen to the majority of people, and alcohol and nicotine also precede harder and more illicit drugs.
Nicotine is far more addictive than both alcohol and marijuana and causes lung cancer, and I can go purchase cigarettes right now if I choose to.
Alcohol is far worse for the body than marijuana, but it’s also a greater threat to public safety. Some anti-legalization groups have tried to claim that the rise in crime in Denver is linked to the legalization of marijuana, but the police say that they don’t believe marijuana can be put to blame.
It’s unclear why Denver’s crime is rising, but studies have shown that marijuana users are less likely to commit domestic violence than non-users.
Meanwhile, some studies have suggested a link between alcohol and violent behavior, and The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence found that alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of all violent crimes. I would contend that alcohol fuels crime in Denver more than marijuana does.
We already have a far more dangerous substance legal, so it doesn’t make sense to me why marijuana would be illegal if not for political reasons, like prohibition was.
