I try to be as neutral as I can when I’m talking about marijuana because of the light it could cast on me. Be too enthusiastic, and people perceive you as a drug peddler. Talk too much about your own experience, and they’ll hear a drug addict. It floors me that weed is still so incredibly taboo in some areas, even after having been such a prevalent piece of mainstream culture in most of American history.
Ohio’s legislature still names marijuana as a schedule one drug, meaning it is just as dangerous as using heroin in the eyes of the law. Changing the stigma around weed is only the first step to correcting all of the legal wrongs that have happened as a result of the stigma. African American people, amongst other people of color to a lesser extent, are disproportionately punished and incarcerated for marijuana charges across the nation.
My essay, however, does not suppose to tackle institutional racism. Instead, I would like to discuss how marijuana impacts college student life as a substance, and how that impact compares with the impact of alcohol. Alcohol, I believe, is the fitting substance to compare to marijuana. They both have similar usage rates in middle school, high school, and college students. In fact, in my essay I hope to persuade that alcohol is the more dangerous (to a college students life) substance.
Unsurprisingly, many of my sources are far from pro-marijuana. They all include the list of potential dangers of marijuana, but may of them are fairly bald in the risks-of-alcohol department. One would think that simply comparing the death counts of the two substances would be enough to persuade people of the parallel. An estimated 62,000 men and 26,000 women die alcohol related deaths every year according to the CDC. An estimated zero people have died as a result of an overdose on marijuana. David Schmader, the author of “Weed: The User’s Guide”, is quoted in Business Insider as saying “Even aspirin can kill you if you take too much, but a fatal dose of marijuana would require ingestion of fifteen hundred pounds in fifteen minutes — a physical impossibility for any human, even Snoop Dogg.”
To be fair, those numbers are a little skewed by context. The number from the CDC is the count of all alcohol related deaths. That means that included in the count are people who may not have been drinking at all, people that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody has ever overdosed on marijuana, but the number of people who have died marijuana related deaths is unknown- albeit I’d wager a guess it is nowhere near the numbers for alcohol.
