It seems that for as long as we’ve been around, we’ve enjoyed losing control of our faculties and behavior for fun, at least temporarily. The means of transport for these little mind vacations may vary, but the two most popular are obviously alcoholic beverages and marijuana.
Though it’s well-known that booze goes way back — each builder of the pyramids at Giza had a one-gallon per day beer ration — fewer realize just how long ago humans took their first toke: Marijuana was one of mankind’s earliest crops, dating back 12,000 years to areas in what are now Mongolia and southern Siberia. In the interim, drinking has become legal for adults in the U.S., while smoking or possessing grass continues to be illegal altogether in 21 U.S. states, and according to Federal law.For those places where weed is legal (BRITESIDE)
There have been lots of crispy conversation of which one is better for you, or really, which one is worse, so let’s see what the statistics and the science say.
1. Risk of Death
Okay, let’s start with the biggest difference. Alcohol kills. Grass not so much. Actually not at all. The CDC says that from 2006-2010 — this is just four years — excessive alcohol use resulted in roughly 88,000 deaths, and 2.5 million years of potential life lost each year. This reflect long-term effects of drinking such as liver disease, heart disease, and breast cancer, liver disease, as well as short-term effects such as drunk-driving, violence, and alcohol poisoning, which is to say alcohol overdoses.
By contrast, the CDC’s Health Effect page for grass lists no fatality figures.
A far as overdoses go, while 10 times the normal amount of liquor can cause one, DrugAbuse.com estimates that you’d “have to smoke between 238 and 1,113 joints in a day to overdose on marijuana.”
2. Likelihood of Addiction
About 15% of people who drink get addicted to alcohol, which isn’t a lot, though it’s more than with grass. (Cigarette smoking, by the way, is more than twice as addictive as alcohol, at 32%.)
There’s some controversy about whether marijuana is addictive in the first place. The NIH estimates that about 9% of smokers develop a level of dependence, though that’s not the same as addiction — it’s somewhere between addiction and a bad habit. As far as withdrawal symptoms go, quitting grass apparently does not trigger them, though quitting drinking can.
3. Impaired Driving
The conventional wisdom is that drinkers drive too fast, and smokers drive too slow, but it’s safe to say one should not drive under the influence of either alcohol or marijuana. Smoking grass increases the odds of an accident by a 83%. If you think this is bad, alcohol’s even worse: A blood-alcohol level of 0.05% increases the odds of an accident by a stunning 575% Not shockingly, doing both together is an even worse idea — no, they do not cancel each other out.
4. Cancer Link
Alcohol consumption has been consistently linked to a greater chance of getting cancer — the US Department of Health, in fact, lists it as a carcinogen. The nation’s top cancer doctors recently issued
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