Marijuana isn't harmless.

Marijuana isn’t harmless. No drug is harmless. As I have pointed out before, Tylenol causes liver damage. A hundred aspirin is lethal.

Marijuana impairs you. It interferes with short term memory. It clouds judgment and disconnects clear thinking and logical reasoning. A lot of people feel clear thinking and logical reasoning are so difficult they are hardly worth attempting. But thinking clearly and logically while high on marijuana is almost impossible.

People smoke marijuana for the same reasons they drink alcohol. It makes you feel good for a little while. Even a very good life can sometimes be annoying, nerve wracking and exhausting.

Some people take a break from all that by reading romance novels or watching Transformer movies. Some people—and sometimes they are the same people—take a break by getting high.

I don’t look down on that. Nobody needs to be so tough that they don’t need to escape sometimes from bosses, bills, broken washing machines and annoying relatives.

There’s no harm in that.

The harm comes when life is so overwhelming that being high is a constant cushion, not just an occasional break.

Someone who is drunk all or most of the time is an alcoholic. There’s no clear word for someone who abuses marijuana because in our culture even rare or occasional use of marijuana is always defined as abuse to justify its illegality. So someone who has a single glass of wine after dinner is not an alcoholic and someone who takes a few puffs of marijuana every evening is not an abuser. I will arbitrarily use “pot head” to designate an abuser, equivalent to “alcoholic.”

Alcoholics and pot heads seek a permanent vacation from life. Of course, life can’t be lived that way. You do have to please your boss, you do have to pay the bills, call the washing machine repairperson and deal with annoying relatives.

Taking an occasional break is good for you. Taking a permanent break will wreck your health and your life.

But let’s assume that you have decided that all the bumps and dings of life are far too painful for you to deal with. You need a deep cushion around you at all times to protect you from all that pain and discomfort. And you enjoy being high.

In front of you there is a big bottle of Jack Daniel's and a big bag of sinsemilla (the most potent and highest grade marijuana). All things being equal, which should you choose?

Well, it’s a no-brainer. This is from David Nutt, a British researcher (NHS means “National Health Service” the famous British socialized health care system).

“A good measure of harm is the costs to the NHS. Hospital admissions for cannabis number less than 1000 per year whereas alcohol now accounts for 1000x as many – over a million last year of which 13,000 were aged under 18yrs.  The role of cannabis in causation of schizophrenia is still controversial – the ACMD in their 3rd cannabis review estimated that to stop one case of schizophrenia one would have to stop 5000 young men or 7000 young women from ever smoking cannabis. Some studies are now suggesting cannabis may help patients with schizophrenia. In contrast, that alcohol causes liver disease is as incontrovertable as is its contribution to the massively accelerating death rates from liver disease in the UK. The frightening contribution that alcohol use makes to domestic violence, child abuse and road traffic accidents were some of the reasons why alcohol scored as the most harmful drug to UK society today in the ISCD scale of drug harms, published in the Lancet last year.”

Alcohol has a lethal dose, marijuana does not. Alcohol is physically addictive, marijuana is not. Alcohol will damage your liver, marijuana will not. Alcohol can lead you to violence, marijuana does not. Marijuana smoke is worse than tobacco smoke. Okay, maybe you should use a vaporizer. You shouldn’t drive when you are high on either marijuana or alcohol. Obviously.

Either drug will do a perfectly good job destroying your life and the lives of those around you whether you become an alcoholic or a pot head.

If your morality is based around reduction of harm and not prudery, it is obvious marijuana should be legalized and, in fact, should never have been criminalized in the first place.