DEFEATED IN THE DRUG WAR

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