Last week I wrote about the bogus reasons marijuana was made illegal. This week I want to touch on the hypocrisy that surrounds it and is preventing its legalization. To tell you the truth, I am not really surprised about what I have learned, but I do think that it is worth sharing.

One of the biggest issues with marijuana studies is that many of the studies focus on the negative aspects of the plant. Yes, there are negatives associated with using marijuana, but the same could be said for just about anything. I don’t see cigarettes being banned because they cause lung cancer, heart disease or emphysema. In fact, I am reasonably comfortable saying that there is nothing positive about smoking cigarettes. Alcohol is legal and glamorized at that, but the negatives associated with drinking like liver disease or drunken driving fatalities are by no means glamorous.

The truth is both tobacco and alcohol have a higher lifetime dependency risk than marijuana. Studies show that 9 percent of all people that smoke pot will become dependent. The same study shows that 15 percent of people who drink will become dependent, and 32 percent of tobacco users will become dependent. I think that we can safely say that marijuana should not be illegal because of its “addictive nature”—this is not a valid argument.

“Pot is a gateway drug.” We have all heard this before, and at one point and time bought into the idea. However, no, it is not and I can attest to that. According to Newsweek there are a number of things that lead to hard drug use that is not marijuana. A few of the indicators that lead to hard drug use are poverty and poor social environment, association with people that use hard drugs and mental illness’ such as bipolar disorder. Here is an idea; maybe prescription drugs lead to hard drug use. Here is another idea; maybe prescription drugs are hard drugs. That’s OK though; doctors prescribe those for us, so how could they possibly be bad right? Well…

According to National Institution on Drug Abuse, prescription drug overdoses in America have increased almost three fold since 2001. In 2001 there was nearly 10,000 deaths caused by prescription drug overdoses, and in 2014 the number of deaths skyrocketed to almost 30,000. I did some diligent research and found 0 marijuana overdoses—Z.E.R.O.

I want everyone who reads this to know that I am not in any way stating that marijuana is 100 percent safe, because it is not. What I am trying to say is before you proudly state how awful you think pot is, or everything that you think is wrong with it, please take the time to analyze other things that are widely accepted in our society. If you really think it through, before you say it out loud you might realize how hypocritical those thoughts are. We drink to celebrate, we drink to mourn and we drink to be social. After a long day at work we crack open a “cold one” to help unwind. We drink because it is tradition, our fathers drank because their fathers drank and their fathers before that.