What’s Worse for Your Brain Alcohol or Marijuana?

Sure, research on the topic is ramping up a bit, but there’s still a lack of large, long-term studies. Although for palliative care, he said, “that would be a different realm of medicine,” in which the goal is to drug a person so they do not feel pain. “Researchers are working around the clock to try to identify the ingredients in marijuana that have potential,” to benefit human health, Baler said. “You’re cumulatively impairing your cognitive function. What’s going to be the ultimate result, nobody can say.” 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. This article has been reviewed by Dr. Anand Dugar, an anesthesiologist, pain medicine physician and the founder of Green Health Docs.

Short-term effects

Addiction is not about the amount of a substance that you drink or smoke. It’s about what it does to your life and the consequences you deal with because of that behavior. 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. Additionally, researchers looking to study long-term marijuana use have had difficulty in finding people who regularly smoke marijuana but don’t also smoke tobacco cigarettes.

1. Additionally, while you can have a cannabis overdose it’s not remotely fatal while an overdose of alcohol can cause lasting damage and even death.
2. When you use it safely, marijuana has many medicinal benefits.9 It’s especially helpful for people with chronic pain.
3. Binge and heavy drinking also play a significant role in developing alcohol use disorder.
4. 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.
5. Here at Vox, we believe in helping everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help to shape it.

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When gray and white brain matter is reduced, cognitive impairment and memory loss can occur. Again, there isn’t significant data to point to specific deaths caused solely by weed. Again, a cannabis overdose can cause increased nausea and vomiting but is not fatal. Even heavy marijuana abuse can at worst cause schizophrenia in people with a history of mental illness. 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.

Edibles Vs Alcohol

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. salvia dosage chart In contrast, “we don’t see any statistically significant effects of cannabis on gray matter or white matter,” Hutchison said. The research shouldn’t be taken as the be-all and end-all in the great debate over whether cannabis is bad for the brain.

In general, marijuana is considered less harmful than alcohol but alcohol can be considered more socially acceptable. After all, you can only purchase cannabis products at dispensaries where in some states you can purchase alcohol in supermarkets. Additionally, alcohol is more socially acceptable in public use or work situations while using cannabis at a work function could be looked down upon. While both are intoxicants they can affect the body differently and can also impact your health differently. Speaking of, let’s examine the addictive tendencies of these substances. Excessive alcohol use can cause brain damage and degenerative conditions like Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which can cause severe memory impairment and other cognitive deficits.

Don’t beat yourself up about what you eat. Instead, cultivate a positive relationship with food.

There may also be a link between daily weed use and poorer verbal memory in adults who start smoking at a young age. “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. The US Department of Health lists alcohol as a known human carcinogen. Research maverick house sober living highlighted by the National Cancer Institute suggests that the more alcohol you drink — particularly the more you drink regularly — the higher your risk of developing cancer. For a 1994 survey, epidemiologists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse asked more than 8,000 people from ages 15 to 64 about their drug use. Of those who had tried marijuana at least once, roughly 9% eventually fit a diagnosis of addiction.

The study was published in the December issue of the journal Addiction. Alcohol may take a greater toll on the brain than marijuana does, especially for teens, a new study finds. Alcohol can contribute to social and behavioral issues, including aggression, mood swings, outbursts, relationship issues, and legal troubles. It’s important to note that when cannabis gets legalized many people may use cannabis semi-legally by consuming illegally purchased cannabis which can lead to them consuming more than standard dosages. This almost points to the importance of regulation so people can use standardized dosages to track their usage of cannabis.

For example, one person may have a very low tolerance for weed but be able to tolerate alcohol well. Another person might not have any issues with misusing alcohol but still find it hard to function without weed. Weed may appear to be safer than alcohol simply because we aren’t yet aware of certain risks.

If you do get hungover, you might experience other effects, including headaches and diarrhea. Getting drunk or high can feel similar to some people, while others describe the sensations as very different. Of course, the way you feel when you’re intoxicated also depends on how much of the substance you consume. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. Stephanie received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

All things considered, alcohol’s effects seem markedly more extreme — and riskier — than marijuana’s.

A lakefront oasis providing a continuum of personalized addiction treatment surrounded by scenic views with private rooms, luxury amenities, and group outings. There’s also some divergence within the specific categories of harm. But alcohol’s crime risk is due to its tendency to make people more aggressive (and more prone to committing crime), while heroin’s crime risk is based on the massive criminal trafficking network behind it. The individual scores account for a host of harwell cause of death variables, including mortality, dependence, drug-related family adversities, environmental damage, and effect on crime. It’s also important to remember that there aren’t many high-quality, long-term studies on weed and its effects. Both can also leave you feeling a bit worse for wear the next day, though this is more likely to happen with alcohol.

Between alcohol and cannabis, many people see marijuana as the lesser evil. You might not even know that weed is addictive.7 As legalization becomes more widespread in the U.S., so do studies shedding light on cannabis use, weed’s potential risks and benefits,8 and addiction. The research on other health effects of marijuana is inconclusive but should warrant some caution. One study linked the use of potent marijuana to psychotic disorders, but other studies suggest people with psychotic disorders may be predisposed to pot use. Research on whether smoked marijuana causes lung disease or cancer has yielded conflicting results, with studies that control for tobacco smoking finding no significant effect from marijuana on lung cancer risk. The other factor that makes it hard to answer this question is the relative lack of studies on the negative health effects of weed.

Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, gave the example of an alien race visiting Earth and asking which land animal is the biggest. If the question is about weight, the African elephant is the biggest land animal. And if the question is about length, the reticulated python is the biggest. Even if two drugs score similarly in Nutt’s analysis, the underlying variables behind the scores can be completely different. For instance, heroin and crack cocaine are fairly close in the rankings. But heroin scores much higher for mortality risk, while crack poses a much bigger risk for mental impairment.

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. Additionally, while you can have a cannabis overdose it’s not remotely fatal while an overdose of alcohol can cause lasting damage and even death. Weed is not without its pitfalls but alcohol is by far more problematic. Alcohol and cannabis are vastly different but often get lumped together because they are intoxicants. The way they make you feel may make them seem similar but their impact on your body and any lasting damage are not remotely the same.