On Monday, President Barack Obama’s administration released a new policy to loosen up guidelines on the federal prosecution of medical marijuana.

The new policy aims to protect individuals who use or sell medical marijuana in adherence to state laws within the 14 states that currently allow for medical marijuana use.

This really got me thinking. The pot issue, that is. It isn’t really something I have taken the time to take a stand on, and frankly, I always try to avoid the petition-pushers with the cardboard signs and a speech ready to go.

Fact is, I’m still not ready to take a stand about whether or not pot should be legalized. The issue has a lot of economic ramifications people much more skilled than I will have to consider.

However, there is one aspect of the issue I find quite puzzling. Why is marijuana so heavily stigmatized when its physiological effects are quite comparable to, if not lesser than, an already quite legal and socially acceptable drug — alcohol?

Time for some comparisons.

According to a study, “Does Heavy Marijuana Use Impair Human Cognition and Brain Function?,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, there exists “far more extensive, consistent evidence of cognitive deficits associated with heavy use of alcohol relative to marijuana, [and] most of the cognitive impairments observed … are not large relative to normal cognitive variability among individuals.”

Next, various government sources claim the lethal dose of marijuana is the equivalent of one third of one’s body weight consumed at once. This is an enormous amount of pot. However, many subsequent studies, including a German study published by Dr. Franjo Grotenhermen, state that the lethal dose for humans is unknown.

Alcohol, on the other hand, can be consumed in a lethal dose in one sitting and it happens all the time. In fact, 1,300 Americans die each year as a result of alcohol poisoning, according to Jointogether.org. According to the National Institutes of Health, 17.6 million American adults abuse alcohol or are alcohol dependent. Marijuana, on the other hand, was likened to “strawberry ice cream” in Time magazine.

In the end, one fact is clear: More conclusive research needs to be done before pot can be legalized across the board. With the stigma pot has, an extensive maze of bureaucratic tape has been constructed around the subject, making any substantial research very difficult to find, indeed.

However, the findings we do have support the conclusion that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, and should be treated as such. To be sure, it won’t be until we can change attitudes surrounding marijuana usage that we can engage in actual, well-founded research to uncover the true repercussions that legalizing marijuana would have for our country.

In the end, we can only trust our leaders to create and enforce effective and justifiable policies if these policies are based in fact.