The federal Centers for Disease Control puts the number of deaths last year in the United States from alcohol-induced liver disease at 15,990. Another 25,692 people died from other diseases as a direct result of alcohol abuse. That's more than 41,000 people whose deaths can be directly linked to the most widely abused drug in the country, and that number doesn't include deaths from accidents and homicides.
The number of broken homes and lives otherwise made miserable because of alcohol abuse can't be quantified with a high degree of accuracy, but the figure undoubtedly reaches well into the millions, or even tens of millions.
Cigarette smoking results in a much larger death toll. The CDC puts deaths caused by cigarettes at 443,000, including 49,400 from second-hand smoke.
Authoritative statistics on marijuana-related deaths are hard to come by.
Marijuana residue can be found in the blood of some people who die of drug overdoses, but other drugs in the system are the main cause of death. There's a debate over whether marijuana is carcinogenic, but regardless, cigarette smoking causes far more lung damage in the United States than marijuana smoking.
Yet, in Florida, alcohol and tobacco use by adults is legal, despite the proven health dangers. Indeed, the government depends on tax revenue from tobacco and alcohol sales to help finance its operations.
The opposite is true for marijuana, which is illegal to use.
Instead of marijuana being a source of tax revenue, Florida and its counties and municipalities spend a fortune each year to arrest, try and incarcerate people for marijuana-related crimes. Marijuana is readily available anyway, and many otherwise law-abiding citizens are willing to flout the law in order to smoke it. In doing so, they bankroll drug lords, who use a portion of their profits to bribe police, judges and politicians.
The last people who want to see marijuana legalized are the drug kingpins who profit from keeping it illegal, and those being bribed.
I'm not here to endorse marijuana smoking, or to claim it's a benign drug. It isn't. But is marijuana a greater threat to a person's, or to society's, health and well-being than alcohol and tobacco? The data indicate it is not, which begs the question: "Why the double standard in the way these drugs are treated?"
People should consider the above facts as the debate heats up over whether to legalize marijuana in Florida for medicinal purposes. The Florida Division of Elections has given a thumbs up to the ballot language for a proposed constitutional amendment, and a campaign has begun to gather the 683,000 signatures needed to put it to a vote.
The proponents claim the amendment is more strict than one rejected by voters in 2009, and that only people with serious illnesses such as cancer or Parkinson's disease would be able to obtain prescriptions.
But you can bet there will be plenty of abuses. The profits derived from falsifying prescriptions and otherwise flouting the law are just too great.
There is a solution, however. The Legislature could legalize and regulate marijuana use, as it does alcohol and tobacco use, and end the medical marijuana charade altogether.
You might think that only left-wing, unreconstructed hippies could advocate such a position, but that's not the case. Many stalwart, decidedly un-hippie conservatives advocate marijuana legalization, and even ending the "drug war" altogether. The late Nobel economist Milton Friedman, whose thinking laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan's economic program, was among them. The late journalist William F. Buckley, the godfather of the conservative movement, also advocated ending the drug war, as does George P. Shultz, Reagan's secretary of the treasury.
The drug war can't be won, and the cost of fighting it doesn't equal the benefits, if there are any. This lesson was learned the hard way during Prohibition, when alcohol was outlawed. People kept drinking as organized crime raked in the cash from bootlegging and rum-running.
Anti-drug crusaders claim drug use will increase precipitously if the drug war is called off, but that's by no means certain. Per capita alcohol use is half that today compared to the first half of the 19th century, and tobacco use has been steadily declining in the United States.
A trillion dollars has been spent fighting the drug war by the federal government alone, yet drugs proliferate. The money could have been put to more productive use in anti-drug educational campaigns.
Kingsley Guy's column appears every other Sunday. Email him at Harborlite3@bellsouth.net.
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