In contrast, Carroll says research shows rates of interpersonal or domestic violence are actually “lower in people who smoke marijuana than people that don’t.” There is also a need for more research into the interaction between alcohol and cannabis, Hutchison said, especially because people who use these substances tend to use both. In contrast, “we don’t see any statistically significant effects of cannabis on gray matter or white matter,” Hutchison said.
Potential for misuse
It can also lower your inhibitions making you more likely to make riskier or rash decisions that can lead to an accident. Cannabis can affect your ability to pay attention, memory, and decision-making. It can overall slow your reaction time and your general perception of time and distance which can increase your likelihood of getting into an accident. Thankfully, as more states the twelve steps alcoholics anonymous 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. 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.
Alcohol or Marijuana: Which is Worse for Your Brain?
While it’s not clear whether marijuana’s role with these outcomes is cause-and-effect, experts generally agree that people younger than their mid-20s should avoid pot. Health risks are just one way to measure whether marijuana is safer than alcohol. While pot doesn’t seem to cause organ failure or fatal overdoses, alcohol kills more than 29,000 people each year due to liver disease and other forms of poisoning. Over alcohol poisoning 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 of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Too much alcohol affects your speech, muscle coordination and vital centers of your brain.
Which is worse, booze or pot? A doctor weighs in
The question of whether alcohol or marijuana is worse for health is being debated once again, this time, sparked by comments that President Barack Obama made in a recent interview with The New Yorker magazine. Sian Ferguson is a freelance health and cannabis writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She’s passionate about empowering readers to take care of their mental and physical health through science-based, empathetically delivered information. Both weed and alcohol can carry a potential for misuse and addiction, but this appears to be more common with alcohol. Weed seems to have fewer long-term risks than alcohol, but again, there’s a huge discrepancy in the amount of research on weed compared with alcohol. While being intoxicated with weed feels different than being intoxicated with alcohol, the two have roughly the same effect on your cognitive abilities, reflexes, and judgment.
- While this might be nice for some folks, it can cause others to green out.
- “That said, people can become addicted to cannabis, and they need to be treated with skill, empathy and compassion.” On the flip side, cannabis may have some genuine health benefits.
- That being said, alcohol still faces all of the same aforementioned tolls on your health and risks of addiction.
- If heroin and crack were legal and more accessible, they would very likely rank higher than alcohol.
- Naimi served on an advisory committee that wanted to lower the recommendation for men to one drink per day.
Variety of products
Both weed and alcohol, together and on their own, are also potentially addictive and can lead to dependence and misuse. Usually, a bad reaction to mixing weed and alcohol will pass within a few hours. Remember, consuming weed and alcohol together can make you feel either more or less intoxicated than you would if you were using just one or the other. A number of recent studies also focus on how combining weed and alcohol affects your driving. A study from 2011 evaluated performance on cognitive tasks among 21 heavy weed users who had consumed alcohol.
It’s about what it does to your life and the consequences you deal with because of that behavior. 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. Based on these findings, the researchers believe that drinking alcohol is likely to be much more harmful to brain health than using marijuana. Their findings linked alcohol consumption with long-term changes to the structure of white matter and gray matter in the brain. While both alcohol and marijuana may have some positive effects, both have the potential to be harmful.
With proper tolerance breaks, you can lower your tolerance of THC and become less reliant ketamine abuse hazards and overdose on large amounts of cannabis to feel the same way and regulate your cannabis use.
Unhealthy alcohol use includes any alcohol use that puts your health or safety at risk or causes other alcohol-related problems. It also includes binge drinking — a pattern of drinking where a male has five or more drinks within two hours or a female has at least four drinks within two hours. Cardiologists warn that use of the drug has sobering consequences for the cardiovascular system, especially in those with unrecognized cardiovascular problems. “There are now higher rates of young people with no obvious cardiac histories going to the emergency room with heart attacks,” says Yale’s D’Souza.
The United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Holland and Australia recently reviewed new evidence and lowered their alcohol consumption recommendations. Ireland will require cancer warning labels on alcohol starting in 2026. Moderate drinking was once thought to have benefits for the heart, but better research methods have thrown cold water on that. Human trials won’t start the second that the DEA makes marijuana’s new status official.
This almost points to the importance of regulation so people can use standardized dosages to track their usage of cannabis. Alcohol use disorder can include periods of being drunk (alcohol intoxication) and symptoms of withdrawal. “The simple message that’s best supported by the evidence is that, if you drink, less is better when it comes to health,” Naimi said. Guidelines vary a lot from country to country but the overall trend is toward drinking less. U.S. policy has also made marijuana research of any sort very difficult. Until recently, scientists had to obtain their supply from NIDA’s high-security Mississippi facility.