Because some people are stoned a lot of the time, while others may use marijuana only on weekends, the health effects become difficult to generalize. For the study, which was published in January, researchers used fMRI scans to see how two alcoholic drinks impacts brain function in 50 healthy adult males. Compared with sober participants, the intoxicated volunteers were found to have reduced functioning in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain linked with moderating social behavior.
Short Sleep Duration Among Middle School and High School Students – United States, 2015
Likewise if he reported that he sometimes had “a strong urge” to use marijuana and that he increased his dose to compensate for tolerance. Such answers do not necessarily indicate that someone uses marijuana “compulsively,” and they say nothing about whether he harmed himself or anyone else. Many people with alcohol use disorder hesitate to get treatment because they don’t recognize that they have a problem. https://sober-home.org/are-toads-poisonous-to-humans-vet-approved-safety/ An intervention from loved ones can help some people recognize and accept that they need professional help. If you’re concerned about someone who drinks too much, ask a professional experienced in alcohol treatment for advice on how to approach that person. If your pattern of drinking results in repeated significant distress and problems functioning in your daily life, you likely have alcohol use disorder.
Detailing the ‘Real Problem With Legal Weed,’ a Critic Grossly Exaggerates the Prevalence of Pot Addiction
For example, a 1992 study had 15 participants smoke a placebo, a high dose of THC, or a low dose of THC on three occasions. On each occasion, they’d rank a different dose of alcohol, including a placebo, as a low dose or a high dose. This is because alcohol increases the absorption of weed’s main psychoactive ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). “After going through all the data and looking at which is more dangerous in almost any metric you would pick, pot really looks like it’s safer than alcohol,” he said. Although results from previous investigations have been contradictory, this study has paid particular attention to the detail and offers a deeper insight into the long-term social and financial implications of cannabis abuse. In total, 18% of participants were considered marijuana-dependent in at least one of the assessments, and 15% were classified as regular cannabis users in at least one assessment.
Substance Use, Suicidal Thoughts, and Psychiatric Comorbidities Among High School Students
Over time, it can temporarily decrease the prevalence of CB1 receptors which can cause memory issues but, overall, the compounds in cannabis including many of the terpenes can be neuroprotective. This means that they can help protect nerve cells from damage which can decrease your chances https://sober-home.org/ of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Now while cannabis deaths caused by disease, illness or drug interactions there are some data points regarding accidents, specifically car accidents. Legalization has provided data points about the potential increase in accidents related to cannabis.
Which is worse, booze or pot? A doctor weighs in
As with the short-term effects of alcohol and weed, the long-term effects differ from person to person. The short-term effects of weed and alcohol differ from person to person. Generally speaking, weed tends to come with fewer risks than alcohol, but there are a lot of factors to consider. Plus, they’re unique substances that produce different effects, which makes side-by-side comparisons difficult. Use of illicit drugs or heavy alcohol use also heightened the odds that a person with diabetes might use cannabis, Han’s team found.
It can be challenging to ascertain how many deaths are caused by cannabis. While there can be the odd allergic reaction or bad interaction or even a child may inadvertently consume cannabis, there isn’t sufficient data to point towards any deaths caused by cannabis. This post will elaborate on the impacts of alcohol vs. weed on your health, body, driving skills, fatality numbers, and the toll they can take on your life. Perhaps the biggest supporting evidence for this point is a 2010 study published in The Lancet that ranked alcohol as the most dangerous drug in the United Kingdom, surpassing heroin, crack cocaine, and marijuana.
“There are segments of the population that want to bypass the entire process, grabbing this nugget of truth … and claiming smoking marijuana can be good for your health and have medical uses,” Baler said. Marijuana affects the cardiovascular system, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, but a person can’t fatally overdose on pot like they can with alcohol, Baler said. “The risk from driving under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis is greater than the risk of driving under the influence of either alone,” the authors of a 2009 review wrote in the American Journal of Addiction.
- It’s best for patients who want to continue to drink to talk things over with their doctors, experts say.
- While there can be the odd allergic reaction or bad interaction or even a child may inadvertently consume cannabis, there isn’t sufficient data to point towards any deaths caused by cannabis.
- “There are segments of the population that want to bypass the entire process, grabbing this nugget of truth … and claiming smoking marijuana can be good for your health and have medical uses,” Baler said.
There’s no single answer to whether people with IBD can consume alcohol, experts say. As with certain foods, it requires experimentation to determine personal tolerance. Tina Aswani-Omprakash vividly remembers the day that led her to give up drinking forever.
More and more people are sober curious, toying with the notion of drinking less. Singh insists that, right now, too little is known about what effects cannabis compounds have on health. According to National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), drinking is responsible for roughly 88,000 deaths per year. It might seem harmless to mix alcohol and weed, but doing so can be a slippery slope toward getting overly intoxicated.
Heavy drug use is never ideal — and marijuana is no different in this regard. People’s responses to each substance can vary greatly, so what seems safer for one person might not work for someone else. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), 15 million people in the United States deal with it.
As a team of pain medicine physicians, anesthesiologists, and surgeons, we knew that there had to be a better way to help patients. Our goal was to give patients easy access to medical cannabis as an alternative to traditional pain medications, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, and other addictive and harmful drugs. Alcohol is also highly addictive and over time addiction can increase your chances of developing health issues and even a physical dependency. As mentioned, alcohol can cause many different negative effects on your body, most notably the liver. Chronic alcohol use can lead to liver diseases such as fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and cirrhosis, gastritis and pancreatitis. Cannabis has been found to potentially increase your chances of developing anxiety, paranoia, and psychotic symptoms.There is ongoing research on the relationship between marijuana use and mental health disorders.
Lehman also cites the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which found that “19 million Americans”—about 30 percent of past-year marijuana users—”suffered from cannabis-use disorder” in 2022. As an explanation for the problems that New York has faced in trying to displace the black market, Lehman’s thesis is puzzling. After all, marijuana is no more addictive in New York than it is in other states that have managed legalization better. And even if it were, how would that account for the agonizingly slow pace at which legal pot shops have been opening?
For one thing, the study looked only at marijuana use in the past 30 days, and the participants had fairly low levels of pot consumption. In addition, Hutchison told Live Science, there could be subtle brain changes that the study’s measurements could not capture. The study included the brain images of 853 adults who were aged between 18 and 55 years and 439 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18. Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder conducted a review of existing imaging data that looked at the effects of alcohol and marijuana, or cannabis, on the brain. Before getting into more about safety, it may be helpful to understand some of the key differences between alcohol and marijuana relating to this discussion.
There are limited funds in the public coffer for minimizing the damage of people’s recreational substance use, so focusing on the substance that does the most damage might make sense, Hutchison said. But there are also many more research questions to answer, and future studies could look at the long-term impacts of cannabis use by following the same people over time, the researchers wrote. Finally, an increasingly popular way of consuming cannabis in the past few years is through edibles, which are treats such as gummies or popcorn infused with cannabis. These edibles allow THC to be taken up directly into the body rather than inhaled through the lungs.
“Above and beyond being diagnosed with a life-long illness at 22, I couldn’t do one of the things that allowed me to fit in with my peers, colleagues, and clients,” says Aswani-Omprakash, who is now 40. Friends, dates, and co-workers would sometimes look at her like she had “nine heads,” she says, when she wouldn’t order a drink. If you answer yes to even one or two of these questions, Lin recommends speaking to your primary care physician or seeing an addiction specialist.
Alcohol is not only more addictive it also can cause more lasting damage to your health than cannabis. While excessive marijuana use can take a negative toll on your health many of these side effects can be reversible. The question policy experts typically ask isn’t which drug is more dangerous, but how marijuana and alcohol should be treated through policy as individual drugs with their own set of unique, complicated risks. That doesn’t mean just legalization or prohibition, but regulation, taxes, and education as well.
Speaking of, let’s examine the addictive tendencies of these substances. Thankfully, as more states legalize cannabis and recreational sales we can observe more data about the effect on death and accident rates. One study examined these data points exploring when cannabis was legalized vs. when retail sales began.
Why is alcohol more socially accepted, despite all the evidence stacking up against it? Carroll thinks that’s an accident of history — because it’s been around and legal for a longer period of time. “It’s hard to argue from data or from actual science that that’s the way it should be,” he said.
As for marijuana, whose legalization for medical uses has been a matter of strong public policy debate for years, there is ample evidence that beneficial compounds can be found in the plant. While both are intoxicants used recreationally, their legality, patterns of use and long-term effects on the body make the two drugs difficult to compare. But despite eating over 600 extra calories when smoking, marijuana users generally don’t have higher body-mass indexes. In fact, studies suggest that regular smokers have a slightly reduced risk of obesity. On the other hand, self-harm and suicide are much more common among people who binge drink or drink frequently.
It’s about what it does to your life and the consequences you deal with because of that behavior. One argument I often hear is that many more people end up in the emergency room after drinking alcohol than smoking pot—and that’s true. But the reason for that is because many more people in this country drink alcohol than smoke pot. Due to the widespread and legal use of alcohol, it is often compared to marijuana, which is illegal in the U.S. Defenders of pot often say it is not as bad as alcohol and alcohol is legal. However, the heavy cannabis users were more likely than the alcohol abusers to have severe financial difficulties; for instance, they more regularly reported difficulty finding enough money to enable them to eat.
