Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco

The argument

Alcohol and tobacco are legal, socially normalised and commercially advertised, and both do enormous damage to public health. In the United States roughly six people a day die from alcohol poisoning — deaths caused directly by the drug's acute toxicity — and around 480,000 deaths a year are linked to smoking tobacco. These are not marginal harms at the edge of two otherwise benign products; they are the ordinary, expected consequences of substances adults may buy in any supermarket. Marijuana sits below both on that scale. It is nontoxic in the relevant sense: there is no comparable record of people dying from having consumed too much of it at once, and nothing resembling the annual death toll attributed to smoking tobacco. Whatever harms are attributed to it, they do not approach the order of magnitude of the two drugs the law already permits. The argument that follows is about consistency rather than about safety in the abstract. Prohibition has to be justified by something, and the justification normally offered is harm — that a substance is dangerous enough that adults should not be permitted to choose it. But a legal system cannot coherently apply that test to marijuana while exempting alcohol and tobacco, which fail it far more badly. Either the harm standard governs, in which case the currently legal drugs are the ones that would be banned first; or it does not, in which case no ground remains on which to keep marijuana illegal. What is left is not a principle but an inherited habit about which substances are respectable. Proponents of this position draw the obvious conclusion. With alcohol and tobacco freely available, there is no reason why a less harmful, nontoxic substance should remain prohibited. Recreational marijuana should be legal.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Just because one thing is less harmful than another does not mean it should automatically get the same treatment. If alcohol and tobacco are significantly worse than marijuana, maybe laws around them should also be examined. Additionally, reinforcing regulations of marijuana are much harder than with alcohol. For instance, while with alcohol a Blood Alcohol Limit can be implemented to stop people driving while intoxicated, no such parameters exist with marijuana despite it impairing users' driving abilities.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Just because marijuana does not cause as many deaths directly as alcohol and tobacco does not mean it should be legal.