Yes, marijuana kills people

The proposition is absurd on its face, yet many people embrace it because it either fits their political ideology or just their determination to alter their consciousness. It's the notion that people can use a "recreational" drug and it will be relatively harmless to them and others.

As a handful of states legalize marijuana, and others look to do the same, the stoner/libertarian argument is that this is a good policy because a) people shouldn't be sitting in prison just for having a joint; and b) alcohol is legal and it's just as harmful if not more so. Before confronting A and B, let's consider a rejoinder that is less philosophical and more practical: Legal marijuana means more people smoking marijuana, and that can't possibly be anything but a bad thing. Now we see some documentation as to why that's the case. WebMD, citing a study by Columbia University, reports that fatal auto accidents involving marijuana have tripled in the past decade:

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"Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana," said co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia. "If this trend continues, in five or six years non-alcohol drugs will overtake alcohol to become the most common substance involved in deaths related to impaired driving." The research team drew its conclusions from crash statistics from six states that routinely perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car wrecks -- California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. The statistics included more than 23,500 drivers who died within one hour of a crash between 1999 and 2010. Alcohol contributed to about the same percentage of traffic fatalities throughout the decade, about 40 percent, Li said. But drugs played an increasingly prevalent role in fatal crashes, the researchers found. Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, up from more than 16 percent in 1999. Marijuana proved to be the main drug involved in the increase, contributing to 12 percent of 2010 crashes compared with 4 percent in 1999.

The study also notes that if people combine alcohol and pot, their likelihood of being involved in a fatal crash increases even more. The effects of marijuana on driving ability have been known for a long time. A driver's depth perception is impaired when he's stoned, so he can't make accurate judgments about the distance between objects. And you're more easily distracted when you're high. Most people who do a lot of driving develop an ability to maintain a certain level of focus that is so inherent it simply happens unconsciously. You're not thinking that intently about every curve coming up and your need to turn the wheel commensurate to the contour of the curve. Your inherent focus just leads you to do it. Drive while stoned and you lose that. What do you think will happen then? By the way, there are just over 40,000 people in jail for marijuana possession. In a country of more than 300 million people, that's just over 1/100th of 1 percent. That's because very few people actually serve time for pot possession, despite the insistence of stoners and their libertarian allies that the jails are overcrowded with non-violent pot offenders. So when you legalize pot, you have the potential to explode the use of the substance and all the resulting societal problems - including fatal accidents - to solve a problem that simply doesn't exist. Where stoners are correct is that alcohol is tremendously damaging to society and to individuals. That's why it's insane to increase the use of another substance that will lead to similar problems, including far more deaths on the road than there are people locked up for possession. And remember, every one of those people who are locked up knew perfectly well that they were in violation of the law, and made the choice to commit the violation. You may not like the law, but when you make a choice to break a law - whether you agree with it or not - you understand the risk you're taking. Unless you're stoned, I suppose. Those people who are being killed in those accidents didn't choose to die. Is your need to get stoned more important to you than those people's lives?