10 Reasons Why Marijuana Is Morally Superior to Alcohol

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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.

Marijuana may or may not contribute to Alzheimer's, emphysema, cancer, and heart disease, whereas alcohol definitely leads to all of those (except emphysema) in addition to cirrhosis of the liver and probably some fucked up kidney stuff, too. We don't have much hard evidence of marijuana's longterm health effects. You know alcohol is gonna kill you, and painfully, if you drink like I smoke.

Statistics clearly indicate that alcohol is the real date rape drug. And how many drunks get in fights compared to stoners? Stoners are just too damn torpid to be violent.

If I had one of those hermetic Harvey Pekar-ish jobs where I didn't have to interact with coworkers then I would try to be marijuana-hungover permanently. The bleary-eyed haze colors everything blissful. Anxiety and stress dissolve as the mind is reduced to a lukewarm golden jellyfish. That is until one too many stimuli are introduced. Then my little sensi samadhi quickly spirals out into confusion. I don't like feeling confused when I'm trying to enjoy my coffee shop ananda. Please don't try to sell me on your internet pyramid scheme if you see me wearing sunnies, starring slack-jawed into the middle distance.

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?)

Alcohol will quickly make you hygienically disgusting, whereas marijuana will only make you a little crunchy. I have been smoking pretty much every day for—oh man—it must be six years now. While I am more often than not too lazy to trim my thick, manly beard, I keep my person pretty clean (I find one shower a week consistent with my eco-values). If you're anything like my former landlord, nightly drunkenness begins to affect your appearance in no time at all. You'll soon find yourself combatting greasy, blemished skin, and gas. Alcohol will make you fat, directly, by changing the way you metabolize sugar, while pot will only make you fat indirectly, through the neurological phenomenon known as the munchies. And if you're anything like that ol' landlord o' mine, alcohol will give you some gnarly yellow fungus under your toenails, too, but you will continue to wear sandals everywhere despite the curled-up lips and wrinkled noses of everyone in whatever room you've just walked into.

Really I could claim any crazy bullshit I want. I have a friend who is fond of saying marijuana oxidizes your muscles. I don't think he knows what that means, but apparently it's good for you. Have I told you yet that marijuana may reduce your risk of cancer of the limbic system, the seat of the bullshit meter? That's right, plus it's a superfood, or a master species, or something.

Pot makes me stay home, eschew social contact, and pursue creative projects. Case in point, this article would not have got written if not for marijuana. Also, I would not have beat Skyrim to 84% completion. Alcohol, on the other hand, leads me to stalk bars, and hit on bootylicious pseudo-hippie chicks for the umpteenth time. Whether I take her home with me or not, in the morning I am left with only a soy yogurt cup and my empty empty soul.

Apologies for the overabundance of parenthetical asides back there. I'm easily distracted right now.