“It make come as a dramatic shock to you, but alcohol has killed more people,”
You commit the fallacy of comparing incomparable units.
Pot and alcohol are alike in some ways, but vastly different in other ways. Someone might argue that alcohol is worse. But, this still doesn’t refute my claim that to compare pot to alcohol is a false analogy.
The question isn’t “lets be consistent and ban all harmful substances that can be abused.”
The question being discussed is: “Let legalize — and thus vastly increase usage — of a harmful substance that can be abused.”
It is like saying:
X (fill in the blank of a legal, harmful thing) is more dangerous than smoking pot, and X is legal, therefore we should be consistent and legalize pot.
We should not make our society worse for the sake of consistency.
Gee, ya think professor?
The graveyards full of those from alcohol related deaths, cheer your keen perception!
Between federal, state, and local, the government is spending $40 billion dollars per year fighting this drug war. Police departments are becoming equipped as military units. Our rights are being trashed in the name of this war. The prohibition of drugs makes criminal operations to supply the drugs incredibly profitable, and the more control the government exerts the greater the profits. The profits flow not only to the drug suppliers but also to all the government employees that are corrupted. The cost of the actual raw materials lost is minimal so they don't lose much when the police do catch somebody. The costs just go up in bribing and threatening enough people to be able to stay in operation.
Tens of thousands of people are dying as a direct result of this drug war and it becomes more clear every year that it is futile. You're not going to stop all the people from using drugs or even a majority of the percentage of the population that would use drugs if they were legal.
All you accomplish is making the government more oppressive all the time and raising the resistance of people to that oppressive government. Sure, we get annoyed when the government tells us we have to use curly lightbulbs, but we eventually comply because making the change really doesn't affect us that much. Make a $40 billion effort to take away from some poor ghetto dweller one of the few things that he sees that makes his miserable life tolerable from day to day and he'll do everything he can to do battle against the society that does that.