Alcohol: 2 million, Tobacco: 5 million, Cannabis ZERO
It appears that legal does not mean good.
The World Health Organization has released a new report stating that about 5 million people die each year from smoking legal tobacco. They want this to change, for some reason.
And they don't think that laws are sufficient for protecting us. If things don't change, the WHO says up to 8 million people will be dying each year from this legal product.
We're from the Government and we are here to help
The WHO appears to want more government intervention:
LONDON – Tobacco use kills at least 5 million people every year, a figure that could rise if countries don't take stronger measures to combat smoking, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
In a new report on tobacco use and control, the U.N. agency said nearly 95 percent of the global population is unprotected by laws banning smoking. WHO said secondhand smoking kills about 600,000 people every year.
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"People need more than to be told that tobacco is bad for human health," said Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO's Tobacco-Free Initiative. "They need their governments to implement the WHO Framework Convention."
The report does focus on the root cause of smoking, not just jacking up the law. Not that the WHO cares, but most people are aware that imprisoning people for substance use merely causes more problems, such as black markets.
measures like increasing taxes on tobacco products and banning advertising don't address the root causes of why people smoke. Smoking levels naturally drop off — as they have in Western countries — when populations become richer and better-educated.
Alcohol deaths worldwide exceed 2 million:
Some research suggests that alcohol consumption in small quantities is healthy; however, excessive drinking can wreak havoc on the body. Alcohol accounts for 3.7 percent of total global deaths and 4.4 percent of global disease, according to the WHO, and 140 million people throughout the world suffer from alcohol dependence.
In addition, alcohol abuse is responsible for more than 60 types of disease and injury. The WHO estimates that 20 percent to 30 percent of esophageal cancers, liver cancers, and cirrhosis of the liver, homicides, epilepsy and motor vehicle accidents are alcohol related. Alcoholism is also a risk factor for one of the top killers worldwide: cardiovascular disease.
But it's legal, you know.
Yeah...it's an issue flogged to death and the facts are meaningless to people. When alcohol was banned in America in the early 20th Century, the crime that the resulting black market supported wreaked havoc on American society and eventually the prohibition was repealed.
Now alcohol, as addictive, unhealthy, and deadly as it is, is legally available in a regulated manner, just like the addictive and deadly tobacco. It's considered a 'free choice' is people want to smoke a cancer-causing plant, or consume alcohol.
These are very, very basic facts but they don't get more traction because, I suppose, most people unthinkingly assume that legal means "good". I imagine they think legal means good because whatever is legal is allowed and whatever is illegal is not allowed.
Why would we allow bad things to be legal? Is it freedom of choice? Is it because making these things illegal is already known to make a bad situation worse? With alcohol we clearly know the answer: you support criminal activity.
The War On Drugs, of course, does the same thing. And it is a genuine quandary.
Most folks who do not spend any time thinking about this can assume that 'real drugs' (cocaine, heroin) are illegal because they are known to be bad for people, but scrutiny of this leads to some other ideas.
I went looking for data on heroin-related deaths and it's not easy to find. It seems there are up to several thousand deaths yearly in America, a few hundred per state. Alcohol kills about 400,000 Americans a year, heroin kills about 1% of that.
Now, I think heroin is a very terrible thing. I think a person is a gold-plated dumbass for even trying it, but maybe I am a weenie, who knows? I do think it is safe to say that legal or illegal, heroin is a serious problem but available data easily shows tobacco and alcohol combined kill far, far more people than all other "illicit" drugs combined.Where's the outrage?
Cannabis
Of course most people know - or should know by now - that cannabis [the Evil Weed, Marijuana!] doesn't kill anybody. It is not carcinogenic and appears to be an untapped source of new medicines.
For those who ARE behind on their information about cannabis I point you to this pdf Congressional Research report on Medical Marijuana:Review and Analysis of Federal and State Policies
This is a special report produced for the US Congress on your tax dollar. This report is made available to all your legislators and this represents the information available to them. It is a little over 50 pages in length and is focused on medical marijuana policy, but the real value is in the details of the report which clearly show that cannabis is not remotely the health hazard or social disruption tobacco or alcohol - or other hard drugs - are.
If you read this report you will pretty much know what you need to know in order to talk about the topic of "marijuana" like a knowledgeable person and not sound like the clueless people who just regurgitate US Government propaganda.
There is a review of the history of cannabis prohibition, and an overview of actions taken to ease or end this extremely backwards situation. Tobacco and alcohol kill millions each year: cannabis kills nobody. Yet it is still severely illegal most places. Even in states like California, which has pioneered the end of cannabis prohibition, the US Federal government and numerous right-leaning private organization maintain an endless blitz of false information and scaremongering about the issue whilst the US DEA continues to raid medical marijuana growers and 'dispensaries' for lack of a better term for the places where folks can obtain legal medical cannabis.
Los Angeles is considering limiting dispensaries, but seems to waffle on the idea:
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday delayed a vote on a much-anticipated medical marijuana ordinance, asking planning officials to return next week with information on how many dispensaries could be closed because they are near homes, schools and public gathering sites.
Council members indicated a vote could come in January on the draft ordinance, which would provide guidelines to greatly reduce the number of marijuana storefronts and push them out of neighborhoods and into industrial areas. The City Council agreed Tuesday to limit the number of dispensaries to 70.
When the state passed a law allowing for medical-marijuana cooperatives in 2004, Los Angeles never set forth guidelines for how they should operate. That led to the rampant growth of dispensaries: The number in the city is estimated at 1,000, making medical marijuana one of the city's fastest-growing industries.
As more dispensaries opened, police, city officials and residents complained that many were illegal cash businesses that had little to do with medical care. The city decided to crack down
The problems they complain of are artifacts of cannabis prohibition and reflect, to some extent, that people WILL obey the law, just as they obey the law on tobacco and alcohol, obtaining it at regulated outlets.
Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level and there remains a non-stop flow of demonizing propaganda, funded by your tax dollar, the 'pot shops" do have huge business potential and people will flock to these places to obtain their herb 'legally' versus buying it off the street.
The extent to which LA cracks down on these dispensaries is the extent to which they are robustly supporting organized crime.It's simple math: the more legal outlets for purchase, the fewer people are buying on the black market. The fewer legal outlets, the more folks are going to have to buy whatever from whomever. Cut and dried.
Alcohol and tobacco, legal or illegal, are problems. They cause rampant disease, they cause needless burden to the medical care system, an issue of huge importance given America's current fixation of healthcare access and reform. Illegal, they will cause even more problems - this is a known fact. Regulated the damages are minimized but alcohol and tobacco are inherently dangerous. The efforts needed to address this lie in public education and social supports. Improving living conditions and access to education and opportunity appear to be the factors that cause people to use these substances LESS.
Cannabis, on the other hand,is not shown to cause rampant disease and is not known for 1 single death, yet it is very vigorously prohibited and there is a massive black market nurturing, among other things, a vast criminal cartel in Mexico. Most people are aware of the violence associated with the "drug trade" down there. The bulk of that trade, contrary to what I used to think, is marijuana, not cocaine or heroin.
Propaganda has trained many americans to fear the term "legalization". They have been trained to equate "legalization" with dead children, heroin addiction, and social havoc, none of which is true.
Legalization actually means "regulation", just like alcohol and tobacco. Available at certain stores with certain licenses and certain precautions and age-limits. Regulation of cannabis would destroy the criminal element within months of implementation if not sooner.
Regulation put an end to the violence and criminality that accompanied alcohol prohibition and it will achieve the same for cannabis, and cannabis is not remotely the threat to society that alcohol or tobacco present.
If we can tolerate the mass deaths caused by legal alcohol and tobacco, we can certainly tolerate non-lethal cannabis.
It is long past time for cannabis prohibition to be ended.
Update [2009-12-10 14:47:39 by xxdr zombiexx]: I would like to direct your attention to a book - Marijuana is SAFER (So why are we driving people to drink?) By Steve Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project, Paul Armentano, of NORML, and Mason Tvert of the SAFER project.
I have this book and hope to provide a real report on it when I get some time during the upcoming holiday breaks (and the house is painted...) I do not get a penny for this - it's all of my own freewill and desire that you, dear reader, have quality, up-to-date information. Please check it out!
And a word from Muddy water who says "There shouldn't be no law, if a man wants to smoke a little dope: