Alcohol Versus Marijuana

About 88,000 deaths per year, between 2006 and 2010, were caused by excessive alcohol consumption. Can you guess how many deaths are due to smoking marijuana? Let me give you a hint, that answer is right around zero deaths per year. This is just my first piece of evidence to support my opinion. My opinion is that it doesn’t make any sense that alcohol is legal while marijuana isn’t.

I’ve seen first hand what alcohol can do to someone. I’ve seen what alcoholism can be like. And it is not pretty. Growing up in a household with an alcoholic parent is not an enjoyable time. Holidays, birthday, special occasions… they’re all ruined. When I think back to my childhood it is very difficult to remember an enjoyable memory. It’s difficult to remember any moment of happiness. They’re all clouded by the horrors that were my alcoholic father. I remember, as I got older, I learned the steps, or phases rather, of my father’s drunkenness. First he would all silly, laughing at everything and telling everyone that he loved them and how happy he was that were there with him. Next came his rants on politics and government, and how he hated certain groups of people. After that he would fall silent. His eyes would start to shut, he would start to sway back and fourth, and you would think that he was about to just pass out. Don’t worry; he wasn’t about to pass out. No, he was just getting started. It was only a matter of time before he came back to life, so it seemed, and just be in a drunken rage. The yelling, the pushing, the fear… That is what the last phase was before he actually passed out. This is when I quickly learned that it wasn’t a choice to fight, flight was the only option I had. Of course at the beginning I was naïve. I thought I could change him. I thought I could talk him out of his rage. The black eyes and bruised ribs I was left with proved otherwise.

You see my father wasn’t that way when he was sober, on those rare occasions that I actually saw him sober. If alcoholism wasn’t part of my life, I think I would have happy memories of Christmas and birthdays. I saw glimpses of this as I got older, but it was already too late. My father had already let the demon take over.

College campuses have a problem with students consuming too much alcohol. Too many times we hear about someone getting raped at a party by a drunken man or woman. Too many times are women taken advantage of because they are drunk and don’t have good judgment. Too many times we hear about men or women getting abused while their significant other was intoxicated.

Now when I think about anyone that I have ever been around that has smoked marijuana, I can’t think of anything bad. They may steal an extra cookie from me, laugh too much, be generally happy, or even just generally quiet. But I have never had anyone hit me because the marijuana changed who he or she were and made him or her violent. Marijuana never let that demon out.

I’m not trying to say that marijuana is a miracle drug that has no bad side effects and doesn’t indirectly cause harm to others, I’m just saying that it blows my mind that alcohol is legal over marijuana. It is weird to me that something that could be equally as bad, if not better, than the other makes one legal and one illegal. Both can have negative side effects on the human body but it seems to me that the risk is much greater when it comes to consuming alcohol.