It is no secret that the United States justice system is completely and utterly backlogged, especially when it comes to drugs. According to the FBI, over 1.5 million arrests were drug-related in 2016 alone, with nearly 85 percent of those arrests being for possession. Half of those arrests were for marijuana possession.

Meanwhile, the number of opioid-related deaths in the United States is staggering and on the rise. Currently, one American dies from narcotic overdose every 19 minutes. Being arrested for possession of marijuana alone is inconvenient, time-consuming and a waste of public resources. It is high time we devoted public energy to the much more pressing opioid crisis over arresting people for possession of marijuana.

The opioid epidemic is currently the leading cause of accidental death in the United States according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Pharmaceutical companies rake in billions of dollars at the expense of the American people. Physicians wrote 259 million opioid prescriptions in 2012, enough for every adult in the US to have their own, also according to the ASAM. More than 200,000 people died from prescription opioid overdose that same year, while marijuana overdose killed a grand total of zero people.

Narcotics are also largely more responsible than marijuana for deaths related to DUIs. While it is obvious that marijuana use impairs judgement, we still don’t have enough mounting evidence to say exactly how much marijuana impairs drivers alone. If a driver is arrested for a DUI with marijuana in their system, they almost always have been drinking or using narcotics as well, with the rate of drivers arrested for narcotic use on the rise since 2015.

For healthy adults, the most common and realistic danger associated with marijuana is not overdosing or injuring someone else, but going to jail. 

If you are arrested in New York City for possession of marijuana, the arrest itself may take on average two to five hours of officer time depending on the severity of the charge and the number of officers involved. According to a Drug Policy Alliance study from 2013, the lower average number of hours spent on an arrest multiplied by the number of low-level (nonviolent) marijuana charges in New York City alone comes out to over 1 million officer hours which is “…the equivalent of having 31 police officers working eight hours a day, 365 days a year, for 11 years, making only marijuana possession arrests.”

Besides wasting taxpayer money, these arrests also aggravate widening racial divides in urban communities. In 2007, about 32 percent of white people and 25 percent of black people ages 18-25 in the U.S. reported using marijuana to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and Health. Despite this small disparity, black people are 8.05 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people in Washington D.C. The district has the second-largest racial arrest gap for states in the nation, with the first being Iowa at 8.34 percent.

The distrust of police officers, the people designated to keep us safe, is escalating within the black community in particular, meaning that people are less likely to report truly dangerous activity out of fear of receiving jail time themselves. In fact, any buyer of any race who knows of a dealer committing very serious crimes has an incentive to not file a report in the name of self-interest. Mass-arresting marijuana users is not fixing the real problems; it is exacerbating them.

It is very easy to point the finger at addicted Americans for allowing themselves to fall so far off the wagon, but shaming opioid users into sobriety is far less effective than passing legislation to combat accessibility and restrict how pharmaceutical representatives can interact with doctors.

In addition, federal funding must increase for opioid research, including in-depth studies of effective rehabilitation and the economic consequences of Big Pharma’s abuse of Americans in pain. Spending massive amounts of time and taxpayer money trying to eliminate nonviolent marijuana use and possession does nothing to combat the largest source of drug-related deaths in American history.  

While we truly do not know the extent of marijuana’s effects on your health, we should not allow ourselves to be consumed by “maybes” and confront the true state of emergency that is both glaringly obvious and solvable. Solving public health crises should be about just that: public health, not just keeping its more vulnerable citizens in line. Realigning our priorities will allow us to move forward as a nation and prevent truly life-ruining substances from overtaking our communities.

Emma Royal is a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering. Her column runs biweekly.