On Tuesday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said that, if he could start society again, he “outlaw alcohol” but “allow marijuana.”
“Let me stipulate a couple of things,” Krauthammer said. “Number one, alcohol is a lot worse. I’ve seen what it does as a doctor. It destroys the body — aggression, car accidents, a lot of damage. If I were starting a society from scratch and had to choose the intoxicant, I would outlaw alcohol and I’d allow marijuana. It’s benign compared to alcohol.”
“The problem is this, Bill — you never start society from scratch,” he continued. “Alcohol is ingrained in the culture. We learned that in prohibition. You have to regulate it. And my question is, do we really want to add a second intoxicant onto that? Because, who knows, it leads to other things. Look, marijuana is not the worst thing in the world. There’s a lot worse, there are harder drugs, there is alcoholism, there’s abortion, the crime, a lot of other stuff.”
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“Generally speaking, I’d agree with you,” Krauthammer said after O’Reilly criticized marijuana. “As the culture has become more coarse, there’s this paradoxical effect where most of the indices of social dysfunction have actually improved. So, I’m not sure we really know the correlation. But I agree with you on the point. You don’t want children stoned. You don’t want a lot of people in society stoned. I would be very interested. I do think that the states are the laboratories of democracy. And we — it’s interesting that we should study what happens in Washington and Colorado because we will see, as the social science comes in, has this had an effect on addiction to harder drugs, has this had an effect on auto accidents?”
“And, you know, the one thing you know — a society where everybody is stoned is not going to do very well, competing with other societies, driving the cars in the street, raising children, being aware and attentive,” he added. “The worst thing about a stoned child is they’re missing out on the periods of learning — social and moral and educational. They lose thousands of hours of their lives when they need to be developing. And that’s what you lose with marijuana.”