10 Reasons Why Marijuana Is Morally Superior to Alcohol

The Streets may have said it best back in 2002, but it bears repeating because, really, who remembers The Streets? Stoners at their worst are harmless and at best are bleeding hearts, sensitive people who would like to see a kinder, gentler America. Alcoholics, well, shit, I shouldn't have to elaborate on that one.

I invoke the word "alcoholic" and all kinds of nasty associations rush into your head. (That is unless you're an alcoholic, in which case, stop reading this and get your ass to a meeting.) Marijuana is the high road, or perhaps the middle way. You know this intuitively, but denial and delusion remain widespread, so I'm going to drive the point home by presenting the ways in which kush is morally superior to alcohol.

NOTE: In retrospect, the responsible way to research this article would have been to smoke weed every day, all day for a week, and then to get drunk every day, all day for a week. Oh well. Next time.

Alcohol is one of the easiest drugs to OD on, and one of the commonest. There are no reported cases of OD'ing on cannabis, ever, at all. In elementary school my DARE officer told our class that a person would have to smoke a pound of pot in an hour to overdose on THC. I don't believe he was citing hard science there, but his point is clear. Even the anti-drug people admit you cannot overdose on herb.

Thanks to the ongoing campaign against drunk driving we have all heard how dangerous it is to combine alcohol and automobiles. But did you have those friends in high school who claimed that they drove better high because, “It feels like a video game?” I never could follow their line of reasoning. How safe do you drive in the Grand Theft Auto games? Well apparently their point has been scientifically proven. In the neurobiology class I took the first time I tried to go to college, they told us about a Swedish study wherein those kooky Swedes closed down a straight stretch of highway and then had subjects hit the bong (this was 1999, no vape yet) and drive straight down this straight stretch of highway. From this they determined people drive better high. So there you have, from the people who brought you the Nobel Prize, stoney driving is safer driving.

Alcohol heroes are fighters, artists who drank themselves to death, and self-aggrandizing frat boys who grow up to be self-serving executive types. Ganja is the drug of sadhus and sufis. Long before Rastafari it was used in religious rituals for hundreds, even thousands of years. Bob Marley and Willie Nelson are cannabis's modern champions. Marijuana has the power to heal even its angriest, most misogynistic fans, such as Snoop Lion, who is all about peace and love now, right?

Alcohol has Bukowski and Hemingway, both of whom got a lot of fine writing done on the sauce, but I don't think you'd want either of those guys in your personal life. Humanity's relationship with alcohol, it has been posited, arose alongside the development of agriculture and a stratified society. The story goes before agriculture our cave ancestors lived in a paleo-utopia (actually it would have been a neolithic utopia, but don't tell that to Lady Gaga or Kobe) where everyone was equal and ate their fill of tree nuts, woolly mammoth, and leafy greens.

Then wheat was domesticated and the ancient leaders of Mesopotamia found it all too easy to make the plebs grow it, ferment it, and then eat the fermented mash, thereby keeping them docile and subservient to their overlords. (Does this sound to anyone else like the story of reality TV?)