This past Monday, Jan. 27, marijuana was approved to be on the ballot in Florida this coming November. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, President Barack Obama was asked his opinion on the trending topic of legalizing marijuana.
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” he said. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
While I don’t think that marijuana offers many positive effects to its consumers, I do agree with President Obama on the opinion that it doesn’t seem as dangerous as alcohol. And apparently we’re not alone in that thought.
According to a Gallup survey done last October, 58 percent of Americans were for the legalization of marijuana, and 39 percent wished to keep it illegal. The Drug Enforcement Agency classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance, which is considered to be “the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychologically and/or physical dependence.” Other drugs in this category include ecstasy, LSD and heroin. The fact that marijuana and heroin are in the same category is a little puzzling considering the drastic difference in dependence and effects between the two.
For example, although both alter the perception and mood of its user, heroin users have a much greater chance of overdosing and becoming addicted because heroin goes to the brain much faster than marijuana, according to drugabuse.gov. It’s also hard to tell if the heroin you are about to inject is a pure dose. There are not many immediate risks that come with smoking marijuana besides the chance of a heart attack within the first hour of smoking because the drug slows down the heart rate. Other than that, the side effects from marijuana are pretty mild.
President Obama urged Americans to proceed on this issue with caution, according to Yahoo.com. While he doesn’t think it is very dangerous to the consumer, he also knows legalizing pot won’t solve any of our nation’s social issues. “I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, and a waste of time,” he said.
A UT junior and graphic design major who wished to remain anonymous had a different perspective. “Smoking marijuana helped me deal with anxiety and depression,” he said. “I do not abuse it at all, but I have used marijuana to get me past some tough situations.” He also talked about his friend’s mother who died from breast cancer and used marijuana for medical purposes while she was ill. “If people realized the potential of marijuana as a medicine instead of a drug, opinions would change,” he said. He smoked with his friend’s mother a few days before she died. He described it as a “beautiful experience.”
When it comes to medical experts, their opinions of marijuana are very different, according to USA Today. “The president is obviously not familiar with the science and frankly doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Stuart Gitlow, the director of the Annenburg Physician Training Program in Addictive Disease at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Gitlow thinks that people just want the freedom to be stoned whenever they want and that there is no real benefit to using marijuana. And what some are not fully aware of is that there is a great deal of risk that comes with consuming it. According to USA Today, an argument often used to defend marijuana is that while you can overdose from ingesting too much alcohol, an overdose on marijuana is highly unlikely. In other words, there is no immediate danger when smoking it. “But nobody dies immediately from smoking cigarettes, either,” Gitlow said in the article.
Smoking marijuana is in fact more dangerous than smoking the everyday cigarette, according to CNN. The National Institute on Drug Abuse warned that smoking marijuana dumps four times more tar into people’s lungs than regular cigarettes do, and the tar in joints when compared with tobacco tar also has a much higher concentration of the kind of chemicals that can cause lung cancer. However, there are other ways to ingest marijuana that make it less harmful on the consumers body such as baking with it or vaporizing it.
One thing scientists are not concerned with is how addictive marijuana could be even though the addictive qualities of this drug are still not fully understood, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They estimated that about only nine percent of marijuana users will become addicted while there are about 17.7 million people that struggle with dependence on alcohol.
So, while it has been made evident through scientific experts that alcohol has proven to have more immediate danger and more common health risks than marijuana, but smoking pot is not completely risk free. I have always seen marijuana as a waste of time and something that is not beneficial to me in any way which has kept me from ever trying it. I do question the sense in legalizing another substance that can be harmful when smoked when we already have issues with alcohol and cigarettes. Marijuana has its advantages and disadvantages, but when it comes to legalizing marijuana I think it will be more problematic than beneficial.
Caitlin Malone can be reached at caitlin.malone@spartans.ut.edu