Prohibition. The 1920’s. Alcohol is outlawed. It’s sale, manufacturing, and distribution is illegal. What a horrible time in America’s history. There would be no beer at baseball games, no casual relaxing drink after work, no inebriation. Prohibition came about in 1919, a time in which extreme intoxication was extremely regular. The Eighteenth Amendment to our wonderful Constitution was put in place to help the economy, to help the working class get their act together and start contributing to society instead of drunkenly mocking it. However, the 1920’s were chock full of floozies and tarts bouncing from club to club, drinking the alcohol that was illegally manufactured and transported. It might have been illegal, but Americans continued their alcoholic nature in secret, until the Great Depression. Alcohol had been outlawed for 10 years before the stock market crashed. It couldn’t have been the cause of our economic plummet, but repealing prohibition, bringing alcohol back to America would create countless jobs and tax revenue in America.
On February 20th 1933 congress proposed the 21st amendment: repeal of prohibition. And, on December 15th 1933, the American people were finally allowed to drink in public, again.[1]
Prohibition was a little under 100 years ago, and I don’t think we’ve learned much from it. This day in age, we have this prohibition of marijuana, cannabis, weed. I don’t completely understand why weed is illegal in the first place, let alone scheduled as a level 1 drug (alongside heroin, ecstasy, and morphine). This means that 1. Marijuana has a high potential for abuse. 2. Marijuana has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the US. And, 3. There is a lack of accepted safety for the use of marijuana under medical supervision. I don’t know about you, but this seems like a bunch of crap to me.
In search of some answers I stumbled upon the CDC’s death count in 2010 that stated there were approximately 25,692 deaths attributed to alcohol overdose.[2] These are only the deaths that were DIRECTLY attributed to alcohol: car crashes, bar fights, drunken suicide attempts, heart attacks triggered by minimal alcohol consumption not included. These are the people that drank so much that they died. Alcohol was the sole cause of death. That statistic saddens me, that many people drank themselves to death. That many people didn’t have to die. That many people passed away because of one simple substance: alcohol.
Seeing that alcohol is legal and weed, well, a schedule 1 substance, I believed that finding the number of pot overdoses would be a breeze. I was mistaken. Searching and searching and searching the number seemed to not even exist and, it doesn’t. There has “never been a documented overdose death due to marijuana”[3]. Zero people. Not one person has died from marijuana overdose. Let me repeat in all
NOT A SINGLE PERSON HAS BEEN DOCUMENTED TO DIE FROM A MARIJUANA OVERDOSE. Fun fact: The amount of alcohol one must drink to die from an overdose is about 10 times the effective dose while the amount of marijuana that one must intake to die from an overdose is 1,000 times the effective dose. [4]That’s a lot of weed, and I’m not quite sure it’s possible for someone to take in that much even if they tried to. So, why on earth is it illegal while the real killer, alcohol, is left to roam free?
Some people argue, “Well, weed is a gateway drug.” I’m sorry if you believe this, but you are mistaken. Weed isn’t the gateway drug, alcohol is. By definition, alcohol is a drug and an addictive one at that. I want you to ask anyone, anyone you know, when they took their first sip of alcohol. I can almost guarantee it was before they smoked their first joint. Let’s be real here. If marijuana is a gateway drug, then alcohol is the gateway drug to the gateway drug. Long story short: Alcohol is the real gateway drug.
I’m not trying to start a new prohibition on alcohol. I’m simply pointing out the fatal flaws in the illegality of cannabis. Personally, I believe weed should be legal, but the real reason it’s outlawed is the same reason we outlawed alcohol in 1920: people using it in excess were not productive, but destructive members of society. Using any substance in excess can cause health problems, laziness, dependence, addiction, and even death. Alcohol is also known to cause bouts of rage that breed bar fights and violence while stoners are simply sitting in the corner, lazily laughing, creatively contemplating, and grittily grinning. So, let's raise our joints in one hand and lighters in the other, cheers to good times, cheers to relaxation, cheers to nonviolence, cheers to jokes and laughter, and cheers to the end of marijuana prohibition.
[1] Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution. (n. d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-first_Amendme...
[2] Kochanek, K., Murphy S., Xu J. (2010). Deaths: Final Data for 2010. National Vital Statistics Reports, vol. 61, No. 4. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04...
[3] Stuart, H. , & Wing, N. (February 28 2014). Here’s Why Those ‘Marijuana Deaths’ Don’t Change The Debate On Weed. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/28/marijuana...
[4] Gable, R. (2006). The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs: Alcohol is more lethal than many other commonly abused substances. American Scientist, 94, 206. doi: 10.1511/2006.3.206.
