Bury the hatchet with old Mary Jane; she's the least of our troubles

There's an extent to which I see the need to keep marijuana illegal. Look at the public awareness campaigns depicting burnouts, with no motivation or direction! It's worrisome to let any habit consume you, and certainly whole families would worry about a heavy pot smoker whose habitual use began to control his or her life.

After contemplating that horror in my mind, I remember Prohibition. We all know how well that worked. Fathers would come home drunk and abuse their families. The government acknowledged this as a problem and enacted a Constitutional Amendment banning basically any activity dealing with liquor in the USA. What did that give us? About the same rate of alcohol consumption and the all-new organized crime industry to provide for us.

Although it defeats my personal principle to say that society cannot, or at least will not, choose to change, it seems kind of clear that pot is going to be smoked, no matter who says you can or can't. In Texas, for instance, (I apologize; I'm going to be using some old data from biased sources but there is some consensus and recurrence of these figures), 4.6% of adults were either imprisoned, on probation, or on parole with marijuana-related charges. That's a lot of weed. The substance is still being smoked, even though it's been illegal for about seven decades.

Another figure that deserves mention, though I'm not certain about its reliability (since it counts complications arising from use with the other drugs, but apparently only short-term with marijuana), is the death toll. In 2001 (yes, that was a long time ago but weed was still around back then), there were 400,000 deaths from tobacco and 110,000 from alcohol. Prescription drugs, homicide, and suicide had some pretty high numbers as well. But no deaths were attributed to cannabis.

Again, those stats are almost definitely skewed in favor of pot. But it does highlight the fact that marijuana is a very difficult drug to overdose on. This stat probably ignores accidents from impaired judgment that may have been lumped with alcohol, because the risk is still there, but if you look at the proportion of marijuana users to accidents with alcohol users to accidents, figures show that weed is the less dangerous drug.

I'm not here to advocate marijuana use. Like any drug, it's a habit that sucks up money and will lead you to no good. But I am here to evaluate a discrepancy. Tobacco and alcohol are pretty comparable in danger to marijuana. They don't have hallucinogenic qualities, but they are pretty bad for your body in the long run. Abuse of the substances can lead to a long, uncomfortable death. Yet those substances are legal in the US. Why? Capitalism. Industries rake in cash off of tobacco, and the government has a gold mine in front of them taxing it. It's addictive, so you can rely on customers to keep you in business.

Why not the same with marijuana? It's bad, sure, but let people do what they want to their bodies. If pot is made legal, it is inherently then made subject to FDA guidelines. Right there we get rid of pot laced with drugs that can kill. It also creates jobs, in effect- plenty of people would happily grow and run their own weed garden. Then, even with a hefty tax (turning the cash spent on incarcerating users to cash brought in from them), most legal vendors could undercut the unregulated stuff that dealers would probably still bring in.

Especially with as many financial burdens as the US is facing, I don't really get why we have to have another with marijuana. There's a huge profit potential if we legalize it, and it's not like the streets will suddenly be full of burnouts. I don't think I'd really smoke it, but I'd probably rest easier knowing that my user friends wouldn't be risking their necks to get a hold of some.