In a survey conducted jointly by NBC News and Wall Street Journal, 60 percent of Americans voted in favor of marijuana legalization. When asked to choose the most dangerous substance between tobacco, alcohol, sugar, and cannabis, 91 percent of the participants chose either tobacco, alcohol or sugar.
Only 9 percent viewed marijuana as most harmful among the four.
The poll was an iteration of an earlier poll conducted in 2014, which had returned similar results. If something has changed, it is the conviction with which Americans support marijuana legalization — support has increased by five percentage points and better awareness has led to fewer misconceptions about the drug.
According to the results of the poll, 41 percent of poll respondents felt tobacco was the deadliest substance, 24 percent voted for alcohol and 21 percent regarded sugar as the most dangerous.
Respondents associated the least amount of health risks with marijuana — a view also backed by statistics:
According to studies done by Harvard Medical School, added sugars, which make up more than 10–15% of the calories consumed by an average American in a day, severely increase the risk of dying with heart diseases.
“Over the course of the 15-year study on added sugar and heart disease, participants who took in 25% or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets include less than 10% added sugar,” says a summary of such studies. “Overall, the odds of dying from heart disease rose in tandem with the percentage of sugar in the diet — and that was true regardless of a person’s age, sex, physical activity level, and body-mass index (a measure of weight)”
Tobacco and alcohol also have been associated with a wide spectrum of health risks. According to a widely-cited survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tobacco was the cause of 480,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2013, while alcohol abuse resulted in 29,001 deaths.
The CDC also cites tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death.
Marijuana, on the other hand, has not caused a single death.
Budbo firmly believes that marijuana consumption is a personal choice and must be consumed responsibly by people over the legal age. Budbo is a Blockchain based company that performs supply chain management of marijuana and marijuana based products in Geo-fenced vehicles which prevents supply chain leakages. Responsible use of marijuana and/or marijuana based products is an aim of Budbo and we aim to achieve it through greater transparency and accounting of marijuana production.
