By SCOTT DURKEE
I want to respond to Susan Wolf’s recent column about marijuana (“Experience shows pot can harm a community, Jan. 15), but I just don’t know where to begin. How about starting with how she lumped together all illegal drugs, from marijuana to methamphetamines? Does anyone agree that these two drugs are equally dangerous? What would you rather have in your neighborhood, a garden or a meth lab?
Including marijuana, meth, heroine and cocaine in the same category is not just misleading, but dangerous. Propaganda about drugs put out by schools and law enforcement does not seem to differentiate between “soft” and “hard” drugs.
As a parent I feared that my kids, as young adults, would try smoking pot and then, realizing that it wasn’t nearly as “dangerous” as the authorities had described, would then decide that meth must not be so bad either. After all, they’re the same, right?
And just as confusing to both adults and children is the creative use of statistics. For example, one statistic cited in the editorial was, “The FBI noted that 80 to 90 percent of crime in the 1990s sprang from drugs.”
That may be true, but isn’t that because pot was illegal in the ’90s, and that anyone using marijuana was committing a crime and was in fact a criminal? (That would include me, like that time I went to the Grateful Dead concert? At the Seattle Center in May of ’95 just before Jerry died? I think we ate some mushrooms too, but I can’t remember.)
After listening to the litany of charges leveled at drugs over the years — and remember, many people don’t really differentiate between marijuana and heroin — I had to wonder if anyone has heard the statistic of how many people have died from marijuana use since records have been kept. It’s easy to remember this one: zero.
But deaths from alcohol? I guess it depends. Alcohol poisoning? Car crashes? Lethal bar fights? Freezing to death because you’re too drunk to make it home? Probably too many fatalities to count — and that’s not even considering the social chaos, destroyed families and ruined lives. Yet we all know how nice it feels to responsibly drink a beer or a glass of wine with a friend.
And cigarettes? I think it’s something like 440,000 deaths a year, every year, year after year. Yet, between 1995 and 2011, taxpayers gave tobacco farmers $276 million in crop insurance subsidies. So if we’re going to wage a war…
Here’s another good one: Far more people die every year from prescription drugs than from all illegal drugs combined. In fact, deaths from prescription drugs have quadrupled since 1999. Yikes! Maybe The Beachcomber’s opinion headline should have read “Experience shows that pharmaceuticals can harm a community.”
One of the important statistics that is always left out of the anti-drug diatribe is the number of people across the country and around the world that have used marijuana — some regularly for decades — who lead healthy, interesting, productive, socially responsible lives. Some might call these people potheads, but I call them engineers, architects, judges, doctors, congress people, journalists, filmmakers, actors, teachers, musicians and every other profession.
The reason that we can’t cite this statistic is that these people simply don’t get counted. Why? Because until recently, they’ve all been criminals and have had to hide the fact that they enjoy an occasional toke. I think that we all might be surprised by the number of people we know who use marijuana responsibly.
But in time, as our society progresses and develops a more compassionate tolerance — and Washington state is leading the way — we may discover that many of our neighbors choose to relax after a long day at work with a joint rather than with a martini — or two.
It sounds as if some people think that if no one ever used marijuana again, all of the problems of the world would go away. They imply that drugs — not social injustice, racism, poverty, lack of education, corruption, war, religious intolerance or any of the other myriad challenges facing society — are the cause of everything that’s wrong with the world.
I don’t know…
— Scott Durkee is a gardener, activist and father of two.
