The bottom line in terms of brain health and overall well-being is to eliminate or reduce the use of both these substances. 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.

How Weed and Alcohol Stack Up Against Each Other

In this time of information overabundance, much of which is inaccurate, unhelpful, or even difficult to understand, Northwell Health is on a mission to make a difference as an honest, trusted, and caring partner. The site connects with consumers to provide them with personalized content that reduces their stress, makes them laugh, and ultimately feel more confident and capable on their healthcare journey. 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. 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.”

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A study from 2011 evaluated performance on cognitive tasks among 21 heavy weed users who had consumed alcohol. This is because alcohol increases the absorption of weed’s main psychoactive ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). It’s also important to remember that people can have very different reactions to the same mix of alcohol and weed. If you’re out in a group, one person’s reaction might be very different than yours. Keep in mind that there are dozens of factors to account for, including how the substances affect your heart, brain, and behavior, and how likely you are to get hooked. In contrast, “we don’t see any statistically significant effects of cannabis on gray matter or white matter,” Hutchison said.

Alcohol or Marijuana: Which is Worse for Your Brain?

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. Studies have found that these effects can persist for several weeks after stopping marijuana use. There may also be a link between daily weed use and poorer verbal memory in adults who start smoking at a young age.

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. This may seem like a petty academic squabble, but it’s quite important as researchers and lawmakers try to advance more scientific approaches to drug policy. Finding the best method to evaluate the risks of drugs is much more complicated than assigning numeric rankings. 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.

So is marijuana really safer than alcohol?

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 explore all the differences between these two intoxicants and explore their impact on your health and society at large. There probably isn’t a perfect way to evaluate and present all drug harms. Researchers will always need to balance making information simple and accessible for policymakers and the public with the inherent complexity of drugs and their effects.

1. On the other hand, self-harm and suicide are much more common among people who binge drink or drink frequently.
2. It can even decrease brain matter and this damage can be permanent.
3. Because denial is common, you may feel like you don’t have a problem with drinking.
4. This means that they can help protect nerve cells from damage which can decrease your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

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. But it doesn’t seem like anyone is taking on this kind of approach — and Nutt’s style of analysis remains popular around the world. Although Nutt couldn’t get funding to do an analysis in the US or Canada, he said a similar study is being published later this year assessing drug use in several countries in Europe. The analysis may be flawed, but its simplicity and accessibility have won over many policy circles. Drug experts broadly agree that individuals and society would arguably be better off if marijuana became the most accepted recreational intoxicant of choice instead of alcohol.

It affects gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) which can cause relaxation but long term use of alcohol can affect your levels of GABA or glutamate in the nervous system. Alcohol can lower inhibitions but it can also impair judgment, coordination, and memory. It can be challenging to ascertain how many deaths are caused by cannabis.

Additionally, any deficits or issues caused by heavy cannabis use can be reversible. Alcohol is highly addictive and some people can have a genetic predisposition codependency vs enabling to alcoholism. Chronic use of alcohol can cause a physical dependency that will require outside intervention to treat this and help you become sober.

They may all taste different, but in terms of the effect that alcohol has on your body, they act the same way. This isn’t the case with marijuana because there are several different strains of cannabis. There are also more than 100 different cannabinoids, which are substances found in the cannabis plant. So, the answer to that question may depend can alcoholics have food cooked with alcohol on which strain of cannabis you’re smoking or what mix of cannabinoids are in it. Based on these findings, the researchers believe that drinking alcohol is likely to be much more harmful to brain health than using marijuana. While this may come as a surprise, both marijuana and alcohol could have some beneficial effects for some users.

Opponents accused lawmakers and Walz of potentially opening a Pandora’s box that could blur eligibility for voting and enrollment in other state programs. In May 2023, Walz signed a law creating a state-run program to provide paid family and medical leave for Minnesota workers, funded by a 0.7% payroll tax on employers, by 2026. Other critics, including Christian conservative groups, claimed the law places vulnerable youths in danger of irreparable harm. Republicans sought to place an amendment in a separate bill to outlaw access in line with some neighboring states.

Marijuana smokers tend to smoke much less than cigarette smokers, as some may smoke one joint a few times a week. Alcohol is more likely than marijuana to interact with other drugs. “You can die binge-drinking five minutes after you’ve been exposed to alcohol. That isn’t going to happen with marijuana,” said Ruben Baler, a health scientist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“On the other hand, the number of crimes that are committed that have some sort of alcohol component related to them are massive — hundreds of thousands a year, if not more,” he said. The team notes that any reduction in the size of white or gray matter or a loss in their integrity can lead to impairments in brain functioning. Gray matter is the tissue on the cymbalta and alcohol brain’s surface that primarily consists of nerve cell bodies. White matter is the deeper brain tissue that contains myelinated nerve fibers, which are branches protruding from nerve cells that transmit electrical impulses to other cells and tissues. For this latest study, Thayer and colleagues sought to learn more about how marijuana use affects the brain.