LET LAWS BE SAME FOR MARIJUANA, ALCOHOL

Re: Looser law sends youth wrong message, May 17.

Letter-writer Terry Hall offered some impossible-to-support contentions
about marijuana's effect.

The most glaring statement was: "Many hard-drug addicts were, in their
early years, just marijuana users. But the slippery slope to crack and
other 'hard' drugs is steep and all too frequent in the quest for higher
highs."

There is no scientific basis for concluding that people who smoke marijuana
are more prone to adopting addictive behaviours with other narcotics.

I am sure that a large proportion of these young marijuana smokers also
drank alcohol, smoked tobacco, played video games and went to public schools.

A pattern of addiction, and the likelihood of a person being prone to
addiction, is far more accurately traced to social and environmental
factors during formative stages in our social development.

Marijuana use may occur in the lives of many individuals who do indeed
become addicted to narcotics. But marijuana use is a symptom of a
condition, not the cause.

Why don't people focus their attention on alcohol and the staggering cost
to society it incurs? So many violent situations, and incredible carnage on
our roads (an estimated 1,690 fatalities and 74,000 injuries in
alcohol-related crashes in 1999 alone), are certainly attributable to
alcohol use. Yet we are bombarded with alcohol advertisements attempting to
lure, in particular, young people into the sexy world of drinking.

Marijuana is not what its opponents attempt to portray it as.

To criminalize those who use it based on ignorance and misinformation is
very wrong. If people can drink alcohol in Canada without risking criminal
charges for possession, people who smoke marijuana are entitled to that
same latitude.

Mark Girvan, Ottawa