NY: Don't Fear The Reefer

Staff Editorial
Source: Columbia Daily Spectator

We're happy that the New York Legislature voted last month to reform the arcane Rockefeller Drug Laws. We look forward to seeing judges give fairer prison sentences to nonviolent men and women convicted of selling or possessing narcotics. Yet while these laws are a step in the right direction, they don't go far enough. A key component of any rational drug policy must include the legalization of marijuana.

Nearly one in every three Americans has tried marijuana, with rates of its use highest among those aged 18 to 20. Last year, authorities arrested a Columbia College senior for possessing six pounds of marijuana in his dorm room on the third floor of Broadway Residence Hall. The former student, Rich Lipkin '04, now has a criminal record. He, of course, is lucky. Unlike the vast majority of those arrested for marijuana possession, he attended an Ivy League university, and therefore does not have to worry about his criminal record permanently preventing him from escaping a life of poverty. Marijuana isn't that harmful. According to the National Academy of Sciences, a joint deposits up to four times as much tar in a smoker's lungs as would a cigarette of comparable weight, but the average marijuana smoker consumes far fewer joints per day than do those who smoke tobacco cigarettes.

Moreover, marijuana is less addictive than tobacco or alcohol: the NAS reports that while 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users become dependent on their drugs of choice, only nine percent of marijuana users do. While nearly 50,000 people die every year from alcohol poisoning-and hundreds of thousands more die in drunk-driving accidents-not one death from a marijuana overdose has ever been recorded. The British medical journal The Lancet has reported that “the smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat than alcohol or tobacco.”

Many call marijuana a gateway drug, one that drives its users to experiment with harder drugs later on. But according to the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws, for every 104 Americans who try marijuana, only one will become a regular user of cocaine and less than one of heroin. In all likelihood, it is marijuana's prohibition, not its use, that leads its smokers to harder drugs. People seeking marijuana must currently turn to a black market, where it is sold alongside and often laced with a host of harder drugs. Legalization would preserve the integrity of the marijuana supply while protecting Americans from exposure to more harmful and addictive substances.

Marijuana isn't that dangerous or addictive, and enforcement falls disproportionately upon the poor.

It's time to legalize it.

Newshawk: global_warming
Source: Columbia Daily Spectator (Columbia, NY Edu)
Published: January 24, 2005
Copyright: 2005 Spectator Publishing Company
Contact: opinion@columbiaspectator.com
Website: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/
Link to article: http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread20155.shtml