by Jeff Wilfahrt

Mar 5, 2014, 4:30 PM

Alcohol, the real gateway drug

America has one and only one gateway drug and it is alcohol.

And if your employer has something as stupid as a “drug and alcohol” policy you should probably regard the policy as inane.

First of all, alcohol is a drug. To say “drug and alcohol” is like saying humans and you. You are a human, just like all the rest, alcohol is a drug, just like all the rest. So delineation in a such a policy title is really rather an ignorant thing to state. Such a policy title probably says more about the author(s) than anything intellectually honest about drug usage.

And on the general topic of drug abuse let us not leave pharma off the hook. They have got to be the biggest pushers around. Come to think of it we banned tobacco advertisement years ago. Aren’t we long overdue to apply the same ban to the pharmaceutical industry?

Last but not least is the current vogue outcry for medical marijuana. Placing the physicians of MN in the difficult position of playing dealer is bad policy and lousy reasoning. What the physicians will experience are a bunch of lying and insincerity on the part of patients in order to get a prescription. The physicians will lose time and energy to what is tantamount to a waste of talent.

Marijuana laws are ineffectual. It is a plant. It grows like belladonna and mushrooms and corn and soybeans and hops. For the believers it is one of God’s gifts.

And just why isn’t alcohol a Schedule 1 drug? It does seem to meet the published criteria… but then many pharma products do as well.

Decriminalize marijuana to the status of alcohol or criminalize alcohol to the level of marijuana.

The former will allow the true pain sufferers drug access and keep physicians free from feeling pressure to play dealer. The latter will not work as we saw nearly a century ago under prohibition.

So the next time your read about some law officer or county attorney or whomever referring to marijuana as a gateway drug remind them of alcohol. If they persist in blaming marijuana you’re safe to assume they fail to see the real true gateway drug as alcohol. You’ll need to repeat this point many many times. Some people are very thick headed. If they suggest it is one more drug remind them of what pharma brings out each and every year… new drugs.

We lose ~40,000 people a year in traffic accidents. Supposedly 40% of these involve alcohol. That’s about 16,000 deaths related to booze. Maybe marijuana is involved in some of these but it is a pretty safe bet it will come out far shy of 16,000.

I can’t help but wonder if the anthropologists among us have ever found a culture who didn’t use something from nature. People just like the way these things make them feel. Some handle it, some don’t. This is not rocket science folks.

Leave the physicians out of it. They don’t need this tomfoolery.

And for goodness sake just tell your employer to call it a drug policy and quit being so damn ignorant when titling things.