Pro-choice or pro-pot? Antiprohibitionists shouldn't replace one set of pharmacological prejudices with another.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? - Book review

Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?, by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Ivert, Chelsea Green, 210 pages, $14.95

DURING THE Euro 2000 soccer tournament in the Netherlands, local authorities let cannabis cafes stay open late and encouraged fans to smoke pot rather than drink. Prior to the Euro 2004 tournament in Portugal, police announced that pot smokers would be left unmolested. In both cases, Steve Fox and his two co-authors report in Marijuana Is Safer, the games and their immediate aftermath were remarkably peaceful.

Were these incidents refreshing acknowledgments that legal distinctions do not necessarily correspond to the hazards posed by drugs, as Fox and friends suggest? Or were they "sinister social experiments" that illustrated "the unholy alliance between alcohol prohibitionists and marijuana reformers," as the journalist Brendan O'Neill argued in a Reason Online article last December? A little of both, I'd say. The challenge for antiprohibitionists is to compare marijuana and alcohol in a way that shows the folly of our current laws without setting drinkers against pot smokers or replacing one set of pharmacological prejudices with another. Marijuana Is Safer does not always strike the right balance. But by tackling "our nation's perpetual double standard surrounding the use of marijuana and alcohol," it advances both the debate about drug policy and the debate about how to advance that debate.

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Fox, now with the Marijuana Policy Project, and his co-author Mason Tvert are the founders of Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), a Denver-based reform group that highlights marijuana's advantages over alcohol. (The third co-author, Paul Armentano, is the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a.k.a. NORML.) SAFER'S strategy is deliberately provocative and not without humor. One of its billboards supporting Amendment 44, a 2006 state ballot initiative that would have made it legal for adults to possess up to an ounce of marijuana, showed a bikini-clad model extolling pot's pluses: "Marijuana: No Hangovers. No Violence. No Carbs!"

But sometimes SAFER'S arguments are needlessly inflammatory and verge on simple-minded booze bashing. A billboard supporting 1-100, a 2005 Denver ballot initiative that eliminated local penalties for adults possessing small amounts of pot, showed a woman with a black eye in the foreground, a man lurking in...