Barry McCaffrey's plea to maintain his little bureaucratic fiefdom
lumps together heroin, cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine and marijuana as
"psychoactive drugs" and then speaks of their "harms" as if all of
those drugs are equally harmful.

While use of "hard" drugs can lead to devastating consequences,
listing marijuana among those drugs is absurd.

By any conceivable objective measure, marijuana is less harmful than
alcohol: It is not physically addictive, it carries zero risk of
overdose, it impairs users less than alcohol, and it doesn't tend to
bring out the violent side of users.

The greatest testament to marijuana's harmlessness is the huge number
of people (more than 70 million in the United States alone) who have
used it with no ill effects.

Shane Ham