SAME RESTRICTIONS SHOULD BE ON MARIJUANA, ALCOHOL

To Jimmy Cox and his Wednesday anti-drug letter:

It's funny that you mention that legalizing drugs would be the "worst
kind of public policy in the history of the United States." As I
recall, another public policy sticks out as pretty awful: prohibition.

You see, there are a lot of similarities between alcohol and
marijuana. Both have the potential for abuse. Both impair your
judgment. Both are a lot of fun to consume.

And while you say that weed causes schizophrenia, the results are
correlative at best and show that alcohol use actually has a higher
chance of "causing" schizophrenia later in life. Alcohol is much more
destructive to one's body, especially if you're a kid. Alcohol
negatively effects every system in the body, ranging from diabetes to
brain damage.

My point is that, nevertheless, alcohol is one of those things that
people (myself included) are going to use anyway, regardless of the
law or the health risks. We might as well allow them to and save
ourselves the trouble of fighting bootlegging gangsters, right?

Same goes for weed, I say. Impose the same restrictions on marijuana
as we do on alcohol - must be 21 to buy, no smoking and driving, etc.
- - and legalizing it can only benefit the country, especially if the
government can see some economic gain. Now, there's one other thing
that always bothers me: Why is it morally wrong to smoke marijuana?
Isn't it more wrong to limit people's freedom in such a basic way?

People should be allowed to take responsibility with their own
bodies. There are lots of better ways to kill yourself, both
physically and morally, that we don't need to waste our time cracking
down on weed. So, about those gun laws ...

Dan Strauss Senior, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering