By Steve Elliott
Hemp News
One can kill you; the other doesn't. Seems pretty simple, doesn't it?
Well, it seems nothing is simple when it comes to federal bureaucrats, who demonstrated their tenuous grip on reality this week. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released a statement refuting a claim in a recent ad by the Marijuana Policy Project that described cannabis as being "less toxic" than alcohol. NIDA is part of the National Institute of Health, a federal agency.
"Claiming that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol cannot be substantiated since each possess their own unique set of risks and consequences for a given individual," the agency lied.
Not surprisingly, MPP quickly fired back, rightly calling NIDA's statement "preposterous," reports David Knowles at the New York Daily News.
"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report no marijuana-use-only deaths each year and there has never been a marijuana overdose death in history," said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the MPP. "It reports tens of thousands of people die from alcohol alone each year and hundreds die from acute overdose."
Citing statistics from the CDC, PolitiFact noted that there were 41,682 deaths attributed to alco0hol in 2010, while cannabis wasn't listed as the cause of any deaths.