By Jake Smith
The response of Hofstra’s chapter of NORML to the editorial in the April 28 issue of The Chronicle entitled “It Shouldn’t Be NORML” was, to say the least, one of bewilderment and awe. Though Mr. Yadgar makes his points in an eloquent and organized way, we do not believe that our stance can be equated with the regime of Adolph Hitler. Furthermore, we believe Mr. Yadgar may have the wrong impression of our organization. He believes that our club indirectly encourages the use of marijuana by not discouraging it, and that marijuana itself is a “harmful” substance.
Mr. Yadgar is one of the many people we wish to educate on the actual effects of marijuana use, marijuana prohibition and the incarceration of marijuana offenders. He states, “The more we educate against the use of marijuana the less people we have to punish for it.” To educate against something is probably one of the most failed notions we’ve seen in history. The U.S. government and numerous other organizations have tried to “educate” citizens on the dangers of marijuana use since the late 1930s when it was first made illegal. Yet much of the time, it’s hard to distinguish between fact and fiction and, obviously, it has done little good.
Because of marijuana prohibition, America’s inmate population has now surpassed two million, drug-related crime is at an all-time high and more than 80 percent of high school students have said they know how to get marijuana if they wanted. Obviously, “education and programming” have not worked, or at least not in the way Mr. Yadgar means education.
When NORML talks about education, we refer to raising awareness of the perils of marijuana prohibition and its effects. Our purpose on campus is to do exactly what Mr. Yadgar suggests: educate. However, to think that telling students not to “abuse this harmful drug” is a viable option for lowering arrests is ludicrous.
And it is certainly not harmful. Firstly, no single individual has ever died or overdosed while using marijuana. Whereas alcohol kills approximately 27,000 people each year and cigarettes kill more than 300,000 a year, marijuana is, in comparison, harmless. There are other things in our society such as fast food, diet soda, and pesticides, which are harmful to the human body, but are still used nonetheless.
Secondly, the U.S. government classifies marijuana as a schedule one drug, which means it has no medical value. Though the DEA’s chief administrative law judge has found that “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man,” the government refuses to reschedule the drug as medicine.
In the 1920s, the United States government decided to enforce the prohibition of alcohol. It was obvious within a few years that this caused many more problems than it solved, just like marijuana prohibition. Prohibition created a black market from which organized crime was able to form and thrive, and still does today. Many unnecessary deaths were caused by battles between police and gangsters, much in the way the drug war is responsible for many of the drug-related deaths today.
If Mr. Yadgar truly believes that we should not be wasting tax dollars on nonviolent drug offenders, he would do the most good by joining our organization. Together, by encouraging University students to be open minded about the benefits of ending marijuana prohibition, we can end this costly drug war and stop arresting responsible marijuana smokers.