112.9 YEARS TO FINANCE THE BAILOUT

This letter to the editor is in response to the article "Finance the
bailout: Legalize weed." In the editorial, the author points out that
"there were 117,752 deaths from smoking related cardiovascular
diseases and 101,043 deaths from smoking related respiratory diseases
in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention." The author can list all the numbers involving smoke
related respiratory or cardiovascular deaths that they want but to
use these numbers as a valid argument in biases of marijuana being
less harmful than cigarettes is completely inaccurate. These numbers
are calculated, as you said by smoke related respiratory and or
cardiovascular deaths.

There is no way to identify whether any of these people were chronic
tobacco users or chronic marijuana users. It would require extensive
research on each individual, after death, to determine whether these
in total 218,795 smoke related deaths were tobacco or marijuana induced.

The author also states that there are more proven negative health
effects by use of tobacco than marijuana.

The last time I checked both smoking tobacco and marijuana both
effect brain cells and their development as well as cause heart and
respiratory disease.

To state that marijuana is a healthier alternative to tobacco is
again completely invalid, unless you specify or provide scientific
data that shows marijuana and tobacco use were equal among the
subjects; otherwise you are again presenting biased data because of
the incomparable use amounts between the two.

Finance the bailout: Legalize weed" touches on the point that
marijuana can effectively be used to help provide a billion dollar
revenue that can shore up deficits caused by the recent bailout
signed by President Barack Obama. According to the author's
statistics up to 6.2 billion dollars could be effectively produced
and contributed towards government savings. 6.2 billion dollars is
clearly an effective and large amount of money that could be
contributed towards financing the bailout but the colossal bailout
was over 700 billion dollars.

If the government applied marijuana tax revenue at a rate of 6.2
billion dollars (note that this figure represents the maximum amount
of predicted tax revenue) contributed towards the bailout deficit per
year, it would still take 112.9 years to pay this deficit off.

For these reasons, I find this editorial completely useless and
invalid as far as financing a 700 billion dollar bailout with
marijuana tax revenue, as well as marijuana being less harmful and
healthier when compared to tobacco use.

CJ Weitz