Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana. Three substances, two heavily regulated and the other outright illegal (mostly). Putting aside the medicinal uses for alcohol and marijuana, out of three which does the most harm? I know what I think, but want to see how many people agree.
Include every ‘form’ of the substance; alcohol everything from Mike’s Hard Lemonade to Château Margaux, tobacco everything from Marlboros to pipe tobacco, marijuana everything from Lebanese import to hash brownies.
Made the poll multiple choice if you think two or even three choices are equally bad.
Not sure about the US, but Australia has a big cultural issue around binge drinking.
The economic loss to the country is massive in terms of:
Drink Driving related costs - property, injury and death,
Law & Order concerns around entertainment areas,
Health Care relating to drinking related injuries (and recall that Australia has a public health care system)
Also, alcohol harms more innocent people(accidents, violent crime, domestic problems, etc). Second-hand smoke might be a close second, but I still think alcohol is worse.
Marijuana is not even in the same ballpark as the other two. In fact, all illegal drugs combined are not nearly as deadly to society as either of the other two.
I’m a drinker but I’ve always said alcohol is by far the most destructive drug widely used in America. It’s also a hard drug just chemically speaking, I’ve never been someone who did drugs a lot but at a few points in my youth I tried enough of a different range of commonly used recreational drugs to say that alcohol is a hard drug. It’s a way harder drug in how it affects you than marijuana. I don’t know people who black out on marijuana and get in fist fights with 3 of their best friends, break random pieces of property, then collapse on the street and piss their pants. That does happen to people with enough booze in them.
From memory most health researchers come up with figures that make tobacco the largest evil known to mankind. They do this by including in their calculations the dollar value of all the work not performed by dead smokers
It’s kind of a tricky question. By one rubric, deaths caused, tobacco is by far the worse of the three. For the United States, about 20% of the adult population smokes, and each year about 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking. This, as far as I can tell, includes all forms of tobacco-related death, including second-hand smoke and accidental fire. In comparison, about 67% of the adult population drinks, and each year about 75,000 die prematurely, in all cases, including alcohol-indicted violence and vehicular crashes. So, there’s a larger population that drinks with far fewer deaths, which one could argue makes smoking worse.
But death isn’t the same thing as social disruption. Smoking won’t turn you into an asshole in quite the same way that alcohol can, and smoking won’t make you more reckless, less inhibited, and it doesn’t affect your memory in the same way.
So while smoking will more likely kill you, alcohol seems to do more damage while you’re still alive, in a sense. The final determination, I guess, depends on how much social disruption all those deaths cause.
ETA: At some point, I just plain forgot about marijuana. But it’s a blip on the radar compared to alcohol and tobacco. Unless, now that I think about it, one includes the violence inherent to the drug trade of which marijuana is, if I am not mistaken, an integral part. Given that it is not difficult to argue that violent sudden death is worse than deaths by accidents (as in alcohol) or slow deaths (as in tobacco), one could posit that marijuana is the worst of the three.
I voted for alcohol as being the worst for society. Tobacco is worse for the individual user–lots of people drink without apparently harming their health, whereas I think most users of tobacco are seriously endangering their health–but alcohol is worse for everybody else: Drunk driving, random brawls and assaults and other anti-social behavior, unwanted pregnancies, and so on, which I think outweigh second-hand smoke and the occasional apartment fire or forest fire or destruction of a 14th-century castle caused by careless smoking. Because of all that as well as its adverse effects on individual health, I would put tobacco in 2nd place (in terms of social impact) ahead of marijuana (or any other drug).
Alcohol easily causes more harm to society than either of the others, but it also has its upsides.
Tobacco might cause the most net harm. Though nowadays, with many localities banning indoor smoking in public places, it doesn’t do nearly as much harm to “society” as such as it used to (as opposed to the harm it does to the individuals who choose to partake).
That’s part of the reason I went with tobacco; it’s more purely negative and more outright fatal than alcohol tends to be. Also, much of the harm of alcohol comes from people misusing it; alcohol doesn’t make people drink and drive, for example. Tobacco is just plain unhealthy, there’s no “safe” way to use it.
Also, while it’s relatively minor on the harm scale, there’s the fact that tobacco stinks and clogs things up and alcohol doesn’t. You don’t have to throw out furniture and rip down the walls to get rid of the stench of drinking in an apartment, nor does drinking junk up the inside of your PC (I recall a poster - MacTech I think it was - posting some pretty disgusting pictures of the innards of tobacco-damaged computers he worked on)
I voted alcohol. While marijuana usage has never been that high and tobacco usage is way down, alcohol is still widely used. Give the current tobacco users another 10 years to die off and death rates from it should decline.
The only one of the three I have ever used much is alcohol and don’t feel my current usage is much of a threat to me or anybody else. I regret some of what I did as a young adult. Norms were different 40 years ago.
I had typed out a nice response and on preview I see that DT has done said it.
One thing I want to throw in … I read a lot of medical records at work and in psych notes I think it’s interesting that the doctor almost always will write “cannabis abuse” or “cannabis dependence” – no matter how rarely sporadically a patient reports they smoke pot. I think this is stupid – someone who tokes up a couple of times a year is hardly “abusing” it.
If one goes by this chart on Wikipedia, alcohol is by far the worst of any of the drugs shown (including drugs like heroin and cocaine), nearly three times worse overall (harm to others + harm to self) than tobacco. However, far more people are adversely affected by tobacco use than alcohol; for example, deaths attributed to each, so I went with that. Also, while many people occasionally drink (the 67% figure that **RadicalPi **gave is almost certainly including people who drink perhaps a few times a year and just one or two drinks at a time, say at a special event), most smokers do so every day, plus moderate alcohol consumption has been linked to some health benefits, while I doubt there are any benefits at all to smoking, even just one cigarette a week.
Not that I do/have done any of the three; I did taste some wine when I was younger but didn’t like it, and the first 20 years of my life had secondhand smoke exposure from my mother, who quit a couple years ago but is still hooked on Nicorette gum (I have told her she should stop but she pushes it off, saying there is no harm, but nicotine itself is associated with some of the health risks from smoking).
I went with alcohol due to my personal encounters with it. I’ve seen far more (personally) death and destruction from alcohol than I have from tobacco. Two dead cousins, a dead uncle, a dead grandfather, two dead friends, and four car accidents (make that six if you include the fatal ones) off the top of my head. One lung cancer.
