Marijuana Doesn’t Kill People (Guns Do)

Last Sunday, one of the networks aired the most insidious television advertisement yet presented by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). In short, the ad (which can be found at www.mediacampaign.org) implies that if you smoke marijuana you will act stupidly, and this could include activities such as shooting your best friend with your dad’s handgun.

In the 30-second ad, two teenage boys—we’ll call them Bob and Frank—are sitting around in what is supposed to be the office of one of their fathers. One of them is smoking marijuana in a bong while the other sits at the desk and makes stoned remarks.

Bob: Hey, if your parents get divorced, who gets the fish?

(laughter)

Bob: Dude, your sister is hot.

Frank: That’s not cool.

Bob: Hey man, check this out. (picks up handgun from desk)

Frank: Cool, is it loaded?

Bob: Naw…

BANG!

Not only does the advertisement create a situation that has never happened (or at least the ONDCP can’t provide a specific instance where it has), but the advertisement leaves most viewers with a different message from what was intended. The most obvious message seems to be that loaded handguns should not be sitting around where teens can get access to them. There are certainly hundreds of accidental shootings each year, because parents leave their guns in a place where they are not locked up and do not use trigger locks for protection.

Blaming marijuana for America’s accidental gun shootings when the ONDCP can’t cite a single specific instance as evidence seems pretty silly. I called up the ONDCP and asked if the horrific scenario presented by the ad has ever actually happened. Spokesperson Jennifer Devallance said, “You know those are actors, right?”

She went on to justify the ad by saying, “There are many, many instances of violence that has occurred either intentionally or accidentally with marijuana or other drugs.” True, but how many actual deaths are there each year resulting from marijuana use? There are no deaths resulting from overdose because it is physically impossible, but there are probably accidental deaths from people who died in accidents and also happened to be using marijuana. In the nine million person New York metro area, there were no deaths in 2000 where marijuana was the only drug involved. In the nine-and-a-half million person Los Angeles metro area, there were eight deaths which involved only marijuana, or less than one-in-a-million. It seems pretty hard to establish causality with numbers that low.

So why did the ad present such an implausible scenario when it could have shown the teens drinking alcohol or snorting cocaine—two drugs which lead to thousands more drug-related deaths per year than marijuana? It’s because marijuana is by far the most popular illegal drug among teens today and its use is on the rise. The Bush administration has foolishly decided to target teen marijuana users and waste billions of dollars each year to enforce what is essentially a harmless drug.

But marijuana’s harmlessness is precisely what the ONDCP campaign is trying to cover up. The gun ad ends with white writing on a black screen that says “Marijuana can distort your sense of reality.” And then fades into “Harmless?”

The unfortunate truth is that the White House’s sense of reality has been distorted by dogma and fears of being called soft on drugs. Marijuana is not completely harmless, but neither are caffeine nor aspirin, which cause hundreds more deaths each year. The war on marijuana is causing much more harm to the public, both financially and socially, than the drug itself ever could.

Decriminalization of marijuana is the only sensible answer because it would allow law enforcement to shift its focus to more important issues, such as terrorism and violent crime, while the ONDCP could shift its focus to more harmful drugs like cocaine and heroin. Decriminalization would save billions of dollars in taxes every year and rescue hundreds of thousands of citizens from the humiliation of being arrested for a victimless crime.