Experts see the rankings as deeply flawed, largely because they present the harms that come from drugs in a rather crude, one-dimensional manner. While both are intoxicants they can affect the body differently and can also impact your health differently. Alcohol on the other hand can heavily impact your cognitive function. It can lead to impaired judgment, decreased reaction times, and difficulty concentrating.
Health Effects Of Weed Vs. Alcohol
He also points out that since the legalization of marijuana, there has been increased hospitalizations in psychiatric and inpatient hospital settings. Hutchison’s study, he said, was different than other studies in the fact that he looked at gray and white matter across all regions of the brain, and also compared the two vices. With marijuana, the studies on its effects on brain health are limited and, also, the findings are across the board. Hutchison said that this variety of outcomes with previous studies led him and his team to investigate marijuana’s impacts on brain health and function. 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.
- There are many consequences of consuming alcoholic beverages, whether it’s beer, wine, champagne, cocktails, hard seltzer, or other types of alcohol.
- It can also lower your inhibitions making you more likely to make riskier or rash decisions that can lead to an accident.
- “Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “and the level of consumption that minimizes health loss is zero.”
- The pot smokers’ brains did not show a reduction or change in either gray or white matter in Hutchison’s study.
Latest stories in Healthy living
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. That study has drawn widespread media attention, appearing in outlets like the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New Republic, and here at Vox. One way to develop a healthy relationship with cannabis is to use it intentionally. If you want to seek out medical marijuana for a specific condition consider finding a doctor with Green Health Docs. Getting a medical marijuana card can ensure that you have access to regulated medical marijuana simply and easily.
Which is worse? Alcohol or marijuana?
It can also be completely out of your system in 1-3 months with you returned to normal levels and function. Weed can impact your memory and in some severe cases cause or exacerbate schizophrenia or psychosis. Despite there being issues, most issues caused by cannabis can be reversible if you stop using is demi moore sober cannabis. Alcohol may take a greater toll on the brain than marijuana does, especially for teens, a new study finds.
Additionally, compounds in cannabis can help prevent some diseases, stunt oxidative damage, and can also help prevent major conditions. Some compounds in cannabis have been found to be anticancer, antibiotic, and powerless over alcohol examples antifungal. Alcohol is legal and can be purchased almost anywhere and everywhere. Some people may consider both substances similar because of how they make you feel. People attribute it to be a social lubricant that allows people to stave off social anxiety and be more outgoing and talkative. Alcohol detox can take a significant amount of time and have heavy withdrawal symptoms, while cannabis withdrawal can last anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks.
Edibles need to be digested and it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to understand how you feel. 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. Alcohol is highly addictive and some people can have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Chronic use of alcohol can cause a physical dependency that will require outside intervention to treat this and help you become sober.
Hist latest book, Raising Mentally Strong Kids, was published March 2024. A lot of research has also linked adolescent marijuana use with a range of negative consequences, including cognitive deficiencies and worse educational outcomes. 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.
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. Unlike alcohol, which slows your heart rate, marijuana speeds it up, which could negatively affect the heart in the short term. Still, the largest-ever report on cannabis from the National Academies of Sciences, released in January, found insufficient evidence to support or refute the idea that cannabis may increase the overall risk of a heart attack.
That being said, alcohol still faces all of the same aforementioned tolls on your health and risks of addiction. 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.
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. 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. Having group activities for substance abuse a blood-alcohol level of at least 0.05%, on the other hand, increased that risk by 575%.
