Cannabis can affect your ability to pay attention, memory, and decision-making. It can overall slow your reaction time and your general perception of time and distance which can increase your likelihood of getting into an accident. They ultimately found a 5.8% increase in injury crash rates and a 4.1% increase in fatal crash rates when comparing the data of cannabis being legalized and when states opened recreational sales. They did find that recreational sales did not increase crash rates as much as the initial legalization did.

The adverse health effects of cannabis: the standard account

Finally, Baler said, because the drug is typically smoked, it can bring on bronchitis, coughing and chronic inflammation of the air passages. While both are intoxicants used recreationally, their legality, patterns of use and long-term effects on the body make the two drugs difficult to compare. One of the main negative issues of weed vs. alcohol is all of the jim carrey fas issues with smoking marijuana.

Voters legalize recreational marijuana

With 6 in 10 respondents willing to drive, people were slightly more likely to do so under the influence of marijuana. It’s also worth noting that field sobriety tests have a harder time picking up traces of marijuana and THC compared to alcohol. Does binge-drinking have a greater impact on heart health than regular use? Those questions, and more, you can listen to these experts answer above in the Facebook Live video. “It’s important to make your doctor aware of any substance you’re taking, whether its an over the counter medication or herbal medicine,” Colvin said. “It can increase or decrease effectiveness or levels of medicine that you’re taking.

The synthetic form used in edibles is called delta-9 THC-O acetate. In fact, marijuana smoke may even be more harmful than tobacco because users hold the hot smoke in their lungs longer to maximize their high. A March 2021 study by Boyd found teens twice as likely to report “wheezing or whistling” in the chest after vaping marijuana than after smoking cigarettes or using e-cigarettes. Hangovers and an increasing sense of anxiety on the mornings after affected her work performance and her ability to exercise, an enjoyable part of her life. One likely reason for the growing public aversion to drinking is the rise of the sober-curious movement. Celebrities like Bella Hadid, Blake Lively and Katy Perry have founded non-alcoholic beverage brands and championed the concept of sober social lifestyles that epitomize health over hedonism.

Today, B has given up alcohol, turning instead to marijuana gummies when she wants a buzz. In the later stages, drunkenness can generate a combination of blurred vision, delayed judgment, lack of coordination, emotional instability and high excitability. As BAC rises, alcohol users can segue from excitement to confusion and even a blackout state where consciousness is temporarily lost.

Adolescent cannabis use and adult life chances

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. The immediate effects of weed can vary quite a bit from person to person. Getting drunk or high can feel similar to some people, while others describe the sensations as very different. Of course, the way you feel when you’re intoxicated also depends on how much of the substance you consume.

Medical cannabis is available in more delivery methods than ever before, such as gummy bears, dried flowers, pills, lotions, drops and a variety of edibles, but what exactly does it do? With so much misinformation and junk-science on the internet, it is important to get solid facts from doctors and scientists you can trust before deciding if medical marijuana could help you. Now leading experts at Harvard Medical School are here to help you separate fact from frightening fiction about medical cannabis so you can make informed decisions.

This post will explore all the differences between these two intoxicants and explore their impact on your health and society at large. Both weed and alcohol can carry a potential for misuse and addiction, but this appears to be more common with alcohol. 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. This makes the task of building scientific drug policies very challenging. The research, based on data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, was published Wednesday in the journal Addiction.

1. All of this helps prove that marijuana isn’t totally harmless — and some of its risks are likely unknown.
2. After cannabis is ingested, an observable increase in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) occurs in anterior brain regions — which are critical for semantic memory, according to a 2001 study in Neuropsychopharmacology.
3. Based on these findings, the researchers believe that drinking alcohol is likely to be much more harmful to brain health than using marijuana.
4. Euphoric effects generally kick in within the first 10 to 15 minutes and are correlated with transient changes in the brain’s electroencephalographic activity (EEG) activity.
5. The analysis doesn’t fully account for a drug’s legality, accessibility, or how widely a drug is used.

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Those products take at least 30 to 90 minutes to take effect because they must be digested and then processed through your liver, she explains. However, dosing with edibles can be imperfect and take time to ascertain so when using edibles it’s best to pace yourself and examine how you feel. However, ultimately cannabis edibles can take less of a toll on your health and provide you with a high or relaxation without causing too much damage to your body or health. There’s a delay in when you feel edibles because it can take time for the THC to be absorbed into your bloodstream. 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.

There are benefits for some conditions, and no benefit for others. And, while there is a lot of positive talk about cannabis, there are risks—especially if you’re over 55. More than half of Americans live in states where recreational cannabis is legal. While alcohol remains the most-used drug in the US, daily cannabis use has actually outpaced daily drinking, according to a study following four decades of consumption trends. Their findings linked alcohol consumption with long-term changes to the structure of white matter and gray matter in the brain. Long-term alcohol consumption can produce physiological changes in the brain such as tolerance and physical dependence.