Drunk Is Fine Weed Is a Crime

_{Filed Under: Prohibition Theater}

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They say cannabis is controversial. They say it’s dangerous. They say it sends the wrong message. But what’s the message of a substance that kills over three million people a year and still gets advertising rights, red carpet endorsements, and zero stigma on a job application?

That’s not cannabis. That’s alcohol.

Let’s drop the pleasantries. Let’s talk facts. Because the story the public is told about what’s acceptable, what’s dangerous, and what’s criminal is a propaganda campaign so deep and so normalized it might as well be policy scripture. The drug war didn’t fail. It adapted. And alcohol is its golden exemption.

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Alcohol is legal in nearly every nation on earth. You can buy it at gas stations. Airports. Grocery stores. Vending machines. It’s poured at funerals. It’s cheered at weddings. It is the social default.

It’s also the third leading cause of preventable death on the planet.

According to the World Health Organization, 2.6 million people died from alcohol use in 2019. That figure has only risen since. More conservative public health reports still put the death toll at over 3.3 million annually. That is about 5 percent of all deaths worldwide.

In the United States, the CDC estimates 178,000 alcohol-related deaths per year. That includes everything from liver disease to suicide to drunk driving fatalities. That is more than opioids. More than meth. More than every other illegal drug combined. Yet alcohol is still framed as responsible adult behavior.

Now compare that to cannabis. Not politically. Not morally. Not spiritually. Just by body count.

Cannabis has zero confirmed overdose deaths in global medical literature. None. There is no recognized fatal THC dosage in humans. The science is settled.

If this were a war of facts, it would be over already.

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One drug kills three million people a year, leads to 200 documented diseases, and spikes rates of cancer, violence, accidents, and brain damage. It gets Super Bowl commercials.

The other drug grows in soil, has known therapeutic potential, and is used safely by hundreds of millions worldwide. It still gets people fired, arrested, and demonized.

This isn’t public health. This is prohibition theater.

The illusion works because alcohol doesn’t just exist. It’s embedded. It is state-sanctioned escape. Weed, on the other hand, is personal, unpredictable, and often grown outside the system. That makes it dangerous to governments, not because it kills, but because it doesn’t.

Cannabis is self-determination. Alcohol is state-approved sedation.

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There’s no better case study of this legal imbalance than the United Kingdom. The UK has one of the world’s most enduring drinking cultures. The pub is not just a business. It is a sacred social fixture. There are over 39,000 pubs across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. That number used to be closer to 60,000 before consolidation and economic shifts. But the pub remains untouchable.

You can walk into a UK pub at 11 a.m., order three pints of lager, stumble out drunk by lunch, and no one bats an eye.

Yet possession of cannabis remains a Class B criminal offense. That means up to five years in prison for personal possession. Supplying or producing it? Fourteen years.

Here’s where the numbers detonate the hypocrisy.

In 2022, the UK saw 10,048 alcohol-specific deaths, a record high. In 2023, that rose to 10,473. These numbers are not inflated. They come straight from the Office for National Statistics. That is a death rate of 15.9 per 100,000 people. One of the highest in Europe.

Cannabis? Still zero confirmed overdose deaths.

How many funerals were caused by a Guinness? How many arrests by a joint?

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Sure. In parts of Canada. South Africa. Uruguay. Thailand. Half the United States. But legalization does not equal normalization. Even in legal zones, cannabis carries punishment that alcohol never does.

In the United States, employees are still fired for off-the-clock cannabis use because THC metabolites linger in the body. Alcohol is gone in hours. Weed lingers for weeks. So the more dangerous substance gets a clean slate, and the safer one gets you fired.

Cannabis patients in the UK still struggle to access basic prescriptions. Most are forced into private clinics. Meanwhile, alcohol is sold on trains.

In Thailand, the government is already trying to walk back legalization due to conservative political pressure. In South Africa, you can grow cannabis but not buy or sell it. Germany recently legalized small personal use, but retail sales remain illegal. In many African nations, cannabis is used traditionally but is still punished colonially.

Meanwhile, alcohol floods the world.

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The double standard is not new. The global criminalization of cannabis was a twentieth-century export of empire and racism, not science. The United States pushed for international treaties to ban cannabis while shielding alcohol and tobacco. Europe followed. Africa was forced into compliance. Asia was pressured through trade threats.

This was never about health.

It was about profit, control, and cultural erasure.

And today, that structure still stands. Alcohol is the lubricant of the economic machine. Cannabis is the grit in its gears.

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Cannabis has shown benefit in managing chronic pain, nausea, epilepsy, inflammation, anxiety, PTSD, and more. It is one of the oldest known medicinal plants in human history. Its safety profile dwarfs most prescription drugs. And yet it is still framed as reckless.

Alcohol, by contrast, is a known Group 1 carcinogen according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It causes mouth, throat, liver, breast, and colon cancers. It worsens depression. It increases violent tendencies. It breaks families. It ruins lives.

But it is never banned. Only taxed.

Weed gets the cage. Alcohol gets the invoice.

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Let’s count.

Globally: 3 million deaths from alcohol per year, zero from cannabis overdose

United Kingdom: 10,473 alcohol-specific deaths in 2023. Cannabis still criminalized

United States: 178,000 alcohol deaths annually, Cannabis workers fired daily in legal states

Globally, Cannabis remains illegal in over 150 countries. Alcohol is sold in over 190

Now ask yourself what the real threat is.

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This is a cultural control issue.

Alcohol rewards conformity. It dulls you just enough to work the next day. Cannabis asks questions. It forces reflection. It does not kill you. It opens you. That scares the institutions of punishment.

This is not about health. If it were, alcohol would be banned tomorrow, and cannabis would be subsidized for every citizen. Instead, we live under a system that kills millions while punishing the peaceful.

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This is not reform. This is a reckoning.

We are done asking for permission. The numbers are on our side. The blood is on theirs. If they do not fix it, we will expose it.

Cannabis is not the problem. It is the answer they are too afraid to admit.

And that is exactly why we keep smoking.

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