here's something most people don't know aboutmarijuana. officially the u.s. federal government classifies it as a schedule 1 drug. that isthe strictest classification they have, period. full stop. that means the government thinksmarijuana is more dangerous than schedule 2 drugs like cocaine or meth. it means theythink marijuana is on the same plane as heroin. about 3,000 people died from heroin overdosesin 2010. you know how many people died directly of overdosing on marijuana? zero. and i don'tmean zero in 2010, i mean zero in basically recorded human history. which isn't to saythat smoking hay bales worth of pot is a good idea. it's not. but notice what i did there.you hear that all the time. that's what we in the media business call the "to be sure"paragraph. it's the paragraph where we cover
our asses. almost everyone says that. even the people who think legalizing marijuana is a great idea don't say it's a good thing. theargument for legalizing pot isn't that pot is good, but that the war on pot is bad. butthere is a way in which legal pot could be a huge public health win. i mean one of thebiggest public health wins we've had in decades, saving huge numbers of lives. let's go backto that drug schedule. there is one drug you won't see on there, even though it is a hellof a lot more dangerous than pot or even cocaine. that's alcohol. the thing about alcohol isit's really bad for you, lethally bad for you. i don't want to be a hypocrite here.i enjoy a drink. but the evidence on this, you cannot run away from it. the centers fordisease control and prevention say there are
88,000 deaths each year attributable to alcohol.about 25,000 of them are just direct overdoses. the numbers here are really amazing. a columbiauniversity study found that being drunk increases the risk of a fatal accident 13-fold. pot,by contrast, increases the risk by less than 2-fold. then there's all the other nasty stuffalcohol leads to. it's a big contributor to violence, to crime, to addiction. it breaksup families. it gives people cancer. it gives them liver failure. people forget this butprohibition -- we laugh at it now but it was happening for a reason. people drank morethen and it was a scourge. so this is the question with legal pot: would people useit as a replacement or a complement to alcohol. if it's a replacement, it's a huge deal. marijuanais a lot safer to use than alcohol. people
don't die from it. they rarely kill otherswhile on it. more marijuana and less alcohol means fewer deaths from intoxication, fewerdrunk driving fatalities, less crime, less violence. but if marijuana complements alcoholrather than replacing it, then it's a problem. if it makes people for whatever reason, drinkmore, then legalizing pot might actually make our alcohol problem worse. now i'm going tosay something that kind of sucks: we actually don't know the answer here. there is encouragingearly evidence. in a survey of canadian medical marijuana users, 41% said they replace alcoholwith marijuana. another survey of california medical marijuana users found they drank lessthan the national average. but those are medical marijuana users. they might be different fromthe general population. people using marijuana
for fun might have a very different relationshipto alcohol than people using marijuana because they're sick. but this isn't just somethingwe can study, it's something that we can affect, that we can change. since we know that a lotof people want to use some kind of mind-altering substance, we could arrange public policy to push themtowards the safer one. but right now, we can't because the federal government, against allthe evidence, thinks that marijuana is an incredibly, insanely dangerous substance withabsolutely no redeeming value under any circumstance. what are they smoking?