aled extremely high doses of marijuana are needed to have any lethal effect. This has led scientists to find that the ratio of the amount of marijuana necessary to get a person stoned is relative to the amount necessary to kill them is one to 40,000. In other words, to overdose, you would have to consume 40,000 times as much marijuana as you needed to get stoned. In contrast, a ten to one ratio of alcohol would certainly cause alcohol poisoning. It is easy to see how five thousand people die of alcohol overdoses every year and "no one has EVER died of a marijuana overdose.""Marijuana is a "gateway" drug that leads to hard drugs." This statement is a recurring myth. Currently, the Netherlands is a prime example of what happens when marijuana is readily available. The Dutch partly legalized marijuana in the 1970s. Since then, hard drug use--heroin and cocaine--have declined substantially. If marijuana really were a gateway drug, one would have expected the use of hard drugs to have gone up, not down. This apparent "negative gateway" effect has also been observed in the United States. Studies done in the early 1970s showed a negative correlation between marijuana and the use of alcohol. In 1993 a Rand Corporation study compared drug use in states that had decriminalized marijuana versus those that had not. The study showed that where marijuana was more available--hard drug use (according to emergency rooms) decreased. In short, what science and actual experience tell us is that marijuana tends to substitute for the much more dangerous hard drugs like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin.The statement "Legalization of marijuana would cause more car accidents on the highway" is yet another myth. Marijuana does impair a person's performance much like alcohol. However, studies of the effects of marijuana on automobile accidents suggest that it poses less of a hazard than alcohol. When a random sample of fatal accident victims was studied, it was foun...
