Marijuana has been giv­ing al­co­hol a bad name. So con­tend booze lob­by­ists, who are get­ting sick of an ad cam­paign that makes the claim that pot is safer than their be­loved bever­ages.

“We’re not against leg­al­iz­a­tion of marijuana, we just don’t want to be vil­i­fied in the pro­cess,” said one al­co­hol in­dustry rep­res­ent­at­ive who didn’t want to be quoted har­sh­ing his col­leagues mel­low. “We don’t want al­co­hol to be thrown un­der the bus, and we’re go­ing to fight to de­fend our in­dustry when we are de­mon­ized.”

The marijuana in­dustry has had a good couple of years: a re­cent poll found that 58 per­cent of the coun­try thinks the product should be leg­al, re­cre­ation­al use has been leg­al­ized in two states already, and this past elec­tion saw the city of Port­land, Maine, leg­al­ize 2.5 ounces of pot. Ahead of the vote in Port­land — which re­ceived 70 per­cent sup­port — the Marijuana Policy Pro­ject put up signs around the city with mes­sages like “I prefer marijuana over al­co­hol be­cause it doesn’t make me rowdy or reck­less,” and “I prefer marijuana over al­co­hol be­cause it’s less harm­ful to my body.”

Al­co­hol lob­by­ists be­lieve it’s a “red her­ring” to com­pare the two. “We be­lieve it’s mis­lead­ing to com­pare marijuana to beer,” said Chris Thorne of the Beer In­sti­tute. “Beer is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent both as a product and an in­dustry.”

Thorne notes that the al­co­hol in­dustry is reg­u­lated, stud­ied ex­tens­ively, and per­haps more im­port­antly already an ac­cep­ted part of the cul­ture.

“Fac­tu­ally speak­ing beer has been a wel­come part of Amer­ic­an life for a long time,” he said. “The vast ma­jor­ity drink re­spons­ibly, so hav­ing ca­ri­ca­tures won’t really in­flu­ence people.”

But MPP takes is­sue with the idea they are paint­ing a false pic­ture. In a re­cent Op-Ed for CNN, Dan Riffle, the group’s dir­ect­or of fed­er­al policies, notes that ac­cord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol ex­cess­ive al­co­hol use is the third lead­ing life­style-re­lated cause of death. Booze also “plays a role in a third of all emer­gency room vis­its,” he says.

And as to wheth­er it’s fair to com­pare the two sub­stances?

“That’s like say­ing we shouldn’t talk about re­l­at­ive harms of sushi to fried chick­en,” said Ma­son Tvert, who in ad­di­tion to work­ing at MPP wrote a book called Marijuana is Safer: So Why are We Driv­ing People to Drink? “It’s im­port­ant that people know the re­l­at­ive harms of all sub­stances, so there’s no reas­on not to talk about the two most pop­u­lar sub­stances in the world.”

Tvert says he could “ap­pre­ci­ate their con­cerns if we were ex­ag­ger­at­ing or mak­ing any­thing up, but we aren’t. We are simply point­ing out the facts.”

Per­haps there’s a need for a booze and weed sum­mit. Tagline: shots taken, not fired.