Inconsistant Drug Laws by Steven O’Neill

     According to the surgeon General 440,000 Americans die every year from tobacco use. According to a drugwarfacts.com poll, alcohol kills 75,000 people per year, and shortens these people life by an average of 30 years. Most people don’t know it but although both of these substances are legal, they are both “drugs”. Nicotine being the main drug found in tobacco products is a stimulant, and alcohol is a depressant. With the death tolls that both of these drugs display, they are still available everywhere if you are of age. In that same poll it states that they have not found any deaths related to marijuana use. After searching the Internet for about 45 minutes to find something that would tell me how many deaths there actually were, only one site gave a number other than zero. That site said that there were 7 car accidents due to marijuana use that resulted in a fatality, and states that the drug was more dangerous than people believe, but gave no factual information. Finding any actual medical information on the web about marijuana is very tough. I wanted to find negative information about marijuana so that I wouldn’t seem to be one sided in my article but just couldn’t find it. But what I always wonder is why marijuana is illegal and these other drugs are not? What is the boundary between legal and illegal drugs? Is there a certain criteria that a drug has to meet in order for it to be outlawed? I am personally not for or against the legalization of marijuana but it seems that our laws on drugs are slightly inconsistent. If marijuana is illegal should nicotine or alcohol, which kill a tremendous number of people every year also be illegal?

This entry was posted on 16. November 2009 at 07:20 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.