MARIJUANA VS. ALCOHOL - DO THE MATH ON THE DANGERS

May we please discuss marijuana, medical or otherwise, and alcohol in
the same sentence? If I were to try to poison myself to death by
consuming alcohol, I could easily do so. That was proved in our
community last year. Were alcohol illegal and marijuana legal,
perhaps we wouldn't have lost a minor to alcohol poisoning last year.
No regular user has ever "poisoned" themselves with marijuana and no
one has ever died as a direct result of having smoked it.

Alcohol is one of the leading causes of vehicular death. As marijuana
becomes legal, there will doubtless be more incidents of "buzzed
driving." While I cannot defend this practice any more than driving
drunk, the mechanics are different regarding attention spans,
reaction times, and cognitive association with one's environment.
Check the police reports, if you wish, but I don't ever recall an
article in the Record Searchlight regarding an accident vehicle
reeking of marijuana. Could it be that marijuana-impaired drivers are
safer than drunks?

Domestic violence is fueled by the consumption of alcohol. Someone
who just got high is inhabiting an entirely different mental
construct than one who just drank. I have never met a violent
"stoner," although I have met more than my fair share of obnoxious,
violent drunks. Logic dictates that any drinker who is against
legalizing marijuana is a world-class hypocrite.

There are, conservatively, 7,500 people in Shasta County who have
medical marijuana prescriptions. Knock the dispensaries, if you wish,
but they will succeed or fail based upon services provided in the
market. Any dispensary that creates a bad name for itself will be out
of business in very little time, without need for police tactics. I
am sure that the people who smoke outside of dispensaries are the
same people who drink in the liquor store parking lot. The ignorant
will always be with us - drunk, stoned or dead-cold sober!

The problem boils down to an implicit threat of enforcing federal law
over state law. This is patently ridiculous, as our president and
drug czar have both said they will not prosecute. I would have rather
our police chief had sent out a letter to all dispensaries reminding
them of their responsibility, as businesses, to our community to
regulate their clients' on-site behavior, rather than to have "blown
smoke" at them.

The bottom line is that, like it or not, this is the end of an era.
Marijuana will soon be legal in the state of California as we, the
people, will vote for legality in 2010. Any deaths associated with
marijuana have been from the criminal element. Legalization will
remove that incentive, once and for all. We Americans are already
bankrupting the Mexican cartels - not through prohibition, but
through de-criminalization! We are watching very bad law under
deconstruction. Those who would vie for control of anyone's mind
through manipulation of law, regardless of the purity of their
motives, really need to create a new paradigm.