Which Is Worse for Your Health: Marijuana or Alcohol?
Both weed and alcohol can carry a potential for misuse and addiction, but this appears to be more common with alcohol. 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. There’s a delay in when you feel edibles because it can take time for the THC to be absorbed into your bloodstream. Edibles need to be digested and it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to understand how you feel. It can damage brain cells and lead to deficiencies in neurotransmitters.
THE ALCOHOL VS. MARIJUANA CONCLUSION
However, this is low compared to 40% of all car crashes that directly involve alcohol. While the growing increase in medical and recreational cannabis legalization is providing a larger data set there isn’t enough tracking to link specific medical deaths to cannabis. Many people struggle to achieve lasting recovery from alcohol dependence, highlighting the need to individualize patient alcohol detox diet eating healthy during alcohol withdrawal treatment based on their life history, genes, coexisting illnesses, and other issues. “Evaluation of the patient for co-existing medical and psychiatric diseases is an important part of the assessment of patients with AUDs, but too often ignored or complicated by detoxification,” said Rummans. For example, AUD patients with major depression have significantly more relapses.
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New research suggests the risks of even moderate or light drinking may outweigh the benefits. In June, the World Health Organization said that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. And a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that binge drinking among adults ages 35 to 50 has reached historic levels. Part of the problem is the challenge of untangling marijuana use from the use of other substances, especially alcohol, Hutchison said.
Marijuana vs. Alcohol: Which Is Really Worse for Your Health?
Public health researchers have said studying rates of injuries, accidents, mental illness and teen use in the wake of the new laws will lead to a better understanding of marijuana’s public health effects. When it comes to addiction profiles, risk of death or overdose, and links to cancer, car crashes, violence, and obesity, the research suggests that marijuana may be less of a health risk than alcohol. On the other hand, self-harm and https://sober-house.net/2022-national-drug-and-alcohol-facts-week-ndafw/ suicide are much more common among people who binge drink or drink frequently. But scientists have had a hard time deciphering whether excessive alcohol use causes depression and anxiety or whether people with depression and anxiety drink in an attempt to relieve those symptoms. On the other hand, low to moderate drinking — about one drink a day — has been linked with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke compared with abstention.
All things considered, alcohol’s effects seem markedly more extreme — and riskier — than marijuana’s.
- However, this is low compared to 40% of all car crashes that directly involve alcohol.
- This means that they can help protect nerve cells from damage which can decrease your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
- 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.
Aside from direct impacts on health effects and dependency, it’s also key to point out that getting behind the wheel while intoxicated by either substance poses significant risks to the user and others. In general, being intoxicated compromises sound judgment and may lead to unhealthy or risky decisions that a person might not make when sober. The truth is, both alcohol and weed may cause negative health effects, including addiction. If you find that smoking weed starts to affect your life in unhealthy ways and leads to unwanted consequences, those are signs you might be developing an addiction and should seek medical care. It’s a commonly held belief that smoking weed has fewer negative health effects than drinking alcohol, especially now that marijuana is legal in New York and many other states across the country. In short, used moderately (in the case of alcohol) or under the direction of a health care provider (in places where medical marijuana is legal), these substances may have positive health effects.
Both weed and alcohol temporarily impair memory, and alcohol can cause blackouts by rendering the brain incapable of forming memories. The most severe long-term effects are seen in heavy, chronic, or binge users who begin using in their teens. 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.
If you’re out in a group, one person’s reaction might be very different than yours. Dr. Singh cautioned that one liver disease, hepatitis, is made worse by cannabis. While it may not be a good idea to combine intoxicating drugs, recent research finds that using alcohol and cannabis regularly has an unexpected effect on your health.
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 of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Considering the statistics you just read about marijuana-based crashes, 40 percent of car crash deaths in the US involve alcohol, and 30 percent of deaths involve alcohol above the legal limit for driving.
Last year, for example, Medical News Today reported on a study linking marijuana use to a greater risk of psychosis in teenagers, while another study claimed that the drug is “worse than cigarettes” for cardiovascular health. On the other hand, no such relationship appears to exist for cannabis. Close to half of all https://sober-home.org/drug-addiction/ adults have tried marijuana at least once, making it one of the most widely used illegal drugs — yet research suggests that a relatively small percentage of people become addicted. In 2014, 30,722 people died from alcohol-induced causes in the US — and that does not count drinking-related accidents or homicides.
Legalization has provided data points about the potential increase in accidents related to cannabis. While there’s some research around the effects of drinking alcohol before using weed, there isn’t much about the opposite approach. A 2017 study looked at a clinical population of people with depression and alcohol use disorder (AUD) to find that marijuana had no beneficial effect, and could have worsened their depression.
