Reply #136: There's a hell of a lot of difference [View All]

Between "marijuana is safe" and "marijuana is safer than the legal intoxicants".

My understanding is that marijuana is safer than tobacco at most levels of consumption, but that's not saying all that much.

Compared with alchohol, it depends on how much you're talking about. Alchohol in small amounts is harmless - I believe small amounts are actually good for the heart, although that may be apocryphal. In sufficiently large quantities it's clearly more dangerous than marijuana - I'm not sure it's physically possible to smoke enough marijuana of standard levels of purity to be as dangerous as drinking, say, an entire bottle of strong spirits at once - but at the levels many people drink at it's safer than all but negligable amounts of marijuana.

"Safer than tobacco"? Yes. "Safe"? No.

I think there's a strong case to be made that it's not dangerous enough to justify banning it, but I certainly won't be experimenting with it any time soon, and I would strongly advise other people not to.