What is mentally/physically most damaging to you? If you were to use either heavily on the weekends only, over years, which would ravage or kill you quicker is my question?
Booze. Next question?
I dunno about that. Although I am not advocating high quentities of either, both have some form of health benefit. But both have deleterious health effects when used in high quantities. Until I see a post with a link to a reputable medical article, I’m gonna say it’s a case of pick your poison.
Heck, even with a decent article, I’m probably gonna say could be either
No one in recorded medical history has ever died as a result of a marijuana overdose. I’m not including deaths caused by the temporary mental impairment of being high, such a stoned driver missing a red light and and plowing into a bus, I’m talking about deaths due to the direct effect on the body. Compare that to the number of people who have died as a result of alcohol poisoning.
I didn’t just mean OD’s/poisons. Even using a hooka, there are still carcinogens in weed smoke. (At least, that’s my recollection from health umpteen years ago.) I will stipulate that alcohol poisoning is easy to bring about, but I did mention that I wasn’t advocating high doses… I was thinking long term effects, such as cirrohsis or cancer.
Good question.
Here’s the Master’s take, c. 1997:
“There are still a few people who think marijuana is a major health threat. But the more common view is that, while marijuana doesn’t exactly qualify as health food, on the whole it causes fewer problems than its two main competitors on the recreational drug scene, alcohol and tobacco. Granted, that’s like saying it causes fewer problems than nuclear war. But you do have to ask why marijuana is illegal and alcohol and tobacco aren’t.”
I await further elaboration.
I would think that most of marijuana’s health risks are related to smoking it. If it is ingested in brownies, for example, these are avoided. Has there ever been a study that has included that form of drug use?
Alcohol’s dangers are proven and myriad. Grass…not so much.
Yes, I realize that. My point was that even looking at just one aspect of the dangers of the two substances, there is a significant disparity.
Also, there is evidence that the rate of cancer due to marijuana smoking alone is MUCH lower than the rate due to cigarette smoking either alone or in combination with marijuana. See this article. Admittedly, the site is biased, but the article itself seems credible and the sources do appear to check out.
I just have to point out that, normally, “heavy users” of either would not include people who partook only on weekends.
But I’d say people who smoked a lot of weed twice a week (and I’m assuming smoking rather than other forms of ingestion) fall more into the “heavy user” category than people who drink heavily twice a week. In any case, I’m going with the marijuana as being more likely to be harmful in this situation, due to the increased cancer risk. But again, if we’re talking only weekends, it’s practically a toss-up to me.
Also, I’m sure that it depends on what you consider to be heavy usage for each.
The dose is important to note here.
This chart basically shows that pot and tobacco smoke are pretty much the same except one has Cannabinoids (get you high) and the other has nicotine. So let’s say that the smoke inhaled has the same potential to cause cancer for both if induced in the same quantities.
Two differences become apparent with regards to the intake of marijuana smoke - quantity and quality.
-
Quantity - For someone to look at a tobacco user and say “Dude, you’re going to get cancer smoking that much!” would require smoking at least 10 cigarettes a day. Below that amount most of us wouldn’t really think someone was going to die from cigarettes. If they went up to 40 cigarettes a day, we’d be laying bets on when they would kick the can. With marijuana you will rarely find someone that will smoke 10 joints a day. I don’t think I have ever heard of anyone smoking that amount, daily, for years and years. And in the OP’s question of a weekend weed warrior, even this amount would be the equivalent of a pack of smokes a week. Again, amounts of marijuana use that would make Bob Marley say “Dude, you smokin a LOT!”
-
Quality - Sensimilla marijuana is pot grown in special conditions to ensure that it does not go to seed. It enters a state akin to a ‘false’ pregnancy and instead of making seeds, it makes little buds full of Cannabinoids, especially THC. The leaves do have THC on them in little mushroom-shaped pods, but the bulk of the stuff that gets one high is located in the buds. This is known as high-quality bud, and if you smoke it primarilly, you will be inhaling at most 1/10th of a gram. per ‘gettin high’ session. If you take the times listed in that chart for ‘being high’ at their MINIMUM of 2 hours, then in one day of being high as a kite all day, one would inhale less than 1 gram of high-grade marijuana, or the equivalent of 3/4 of a tobacco cigarette. Again, with the OP’s weekend weed warrior that means about 1.5 cigarettes worth of pot for the whole weekend. Even if we round up we are looking at 2 grams for the whole weekend…which is a lot of pot to smoke.
Also, you can vaporize pot - they sell special machines for this. THC burns at a lower temperature than the leafy material, so you can get the temp up to the point where the THC burns, but the leaf’s don’t. Thus you avoid all the nasty cancer stuff completely. The THC does not cause cancer, just the by-products of the leafy material when smoked.
And, as pointed out earlier, you don’t NEED to smoke pot to get high, you can ingest it - pot brownies, pot butter, pot pizza, etc. It just takes more.
In comparison, how much alcohol would one have to ingest to stay drunk all weekend long? A WHOLE F*&$LOAD!
It can be proven that if taken to levels of intoxication (drunk or high), marijuana is the far safer choice. A glass of wine a day has health benefits; a whole bottle does not. Compare a bottle of wine to 1/10th of a gram of pot inhaled (about the size of a pea) and you should find that far from surprising.
-Tcat
as far as acute toxicity goes THC is about 5-10x more toxic than alcohol to rats
THC 666 MG/KG ORAL-RAT LD50; from http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/thc_data_sheet.shtml
ethanol is about 7000 mg/kg
mind you after taking 49g of THC in one hit you may wish you were dead or probably wouldn’t even notice
However the pharmaceutical safety margin is much better for THC, eg. the normal dose is about 1-15 mg (depending on route), 200-6000 x less than the lethal dose. For alcohol a normal dose would be about 40 g, only 10 x less than a lethal dose
Poor little ORAL-RAT had to be so high dude.
Sorry, but what is this? :eek:
The EPA, among other things, regulates the storage and disposal of medical and chemical waste.
Are you saying it’s a 15lb rat? DAMN!
A 150 lb person woudl need 490g of THC to be lethal, not 49g, if that’s what you were implying.
It doesn’t. For one thing, tobacco has a nasty habit of storing radioactive polonium 210 in its leaves. Po 210 is an alpha emitter. Normally, alpha particles are harmless, since they are easily blocked - even a sheet of paper will do it - and skin blocks them out quite well. But when you get the stuff lodged in your lungs, you’re asking for trouble. There is also considerable evidence that marijuana smoke does not contain the levels of carcinogens that tobacco smoke does; benzene, for instance. This doesn’t mean that smoking it is good for your lungs - there’s still the issue of particulate matter accumulation which leads to its own set of problems, but it appears that given equal levels of smoking, pot smoke is far less dangerous than tobacco smoke.
The only “special condition” here is that the female plants go unfertilized. All the growers have to do is weed out the male plants before they fully mature and produce pollen.
Vaporizers don’t “burn” the THC, they do exactly what their name implies: they vaporize it. THC boils at about 200 degrees C, so the machines run at just above this temp, normally. This ensures that all the THC boils off, but is well below the ignition temperature of the plant material.
Marijuana is not completely benign, and has probably played a role in several of the accidents (some serious) I have seen in my emergency department. There is no doubt in my mind alcohol causes far more problems. In addition to liver damage, Wernicke’s encephalopathy, Korsakoff psychosis, pancreatitis, alcohol poisoning, stomach ulcers, alcohol related comas, malnutrition secondary to alcohol intake, car accidents, head injuries, falls – alcohol also seems to play a much bigger role in domestic violence and family co-morbidity than marijuana does.
Marijuana has the following harmful effects:
Weed v. Booze
I wonder if anywhere in the annals of law a Thomas Weed sued Daniel Booze, leading to the case of Weed v. Booze. 
Among my friends, I would say that those who use alcohol as their drug of choice have more negative consequences than those who choose cannabis.
Just to put things in perspective, here’s another question:
Which is more dangerous to an individuals long-term health: moderate-to-heavy marijuana smoking, moderate-to-heavy drinking, or a high-fat, low-exercise lifestyle?
Gettin’ picky-wid-it: The chart I linked to shows Benzene as one of the few chemicals that pot has more of. Although that test was probably done on pot leafs, not bud. I never knew about polonium 210…So kids, tobacco is bad for you, Mmm’kay?
Ixnay on the etails-day, hommie! Wanna get a thread closed? It’s called the K.I.S.S. principle. OR do you want to throw in your favorite Crack recipe too? 
Thanks, I actually thought that cloud in the canister was THC smoke and that the name was just easier than “smokerizer.”
-Tcat