While there are negative benefits, cannabis does have many medicinal benefits including treatment of pain, nausea, issues with eating or keeping down food, and can help treat anxiety and depression. It can cause mood swings and we’re all familiar with people who are “angry drunks.” The impact of alcohol can vary based on how much you’re using and how your body interacts with it. Excessive alcohol use can cause brain damage and degenerative conditions like Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which can cause severe memory impairment demi lovato first album and other cognitive deficits. It can even decrease brain matter and this damage can be permanent.
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. It can also be completely out of your system in 1-3 months with you returned to normal levels and function. Speaking of, let’s examine the addictive tendencies of these substances.
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But cigarette smoking plays a complicated role in studying the impact of marijuana smoke, Baler said. Marijuana smokers tend to smoke much less than cigarette smokers, as some may smoke one joint a few times a week. Drinking can lead to alcoholic liver disease, which can progress to fibrosis of the liver, which in turn can potentially lead to liver cancer, Murray said. Alcohol is more likely than marijuana to interact with other drugs. “You can die binge-drinking five minutes after you’ve been exposed to alcohol. That isn’t going to happen with marijuana,” said Ruben Baler, a health scientist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
While excessive drinking has been somewhat pacified on social media or even in real-life social settings, drinking can be deceptively dangerous, and binge drinking is particularly troubling. The pot smokers’ brains did not show a reduction or change in either gray or white matter in Hutchison’s study. When gray and white brain matter is reduced, cognitive impairment and memory loss can occur. Just one drink a day can raise blood pressure, trigger a dangerous irregular heartbeat or even shrink your brain, studies have found. Those are just a few of the many pitfalls of alcohol use, including the risk of cancer.
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- Read on as we explore their answers and attitudes toward these substances.
- It’s important to understand the distinct difference between alcohol and cannabis addiction.
- Adding alcohol to a low dose of THC impaired driving simulator scores by 21 percent.
- Many of the issues have to do with legality and preconceived judgment of cannabis.
Despite there being issues, most issues caused by cannabis can be reversible if you stop using cannabis. Thankfully, as more states legalize cannabis and recreational sales we can observe more data about the effect on death and accident rates. One study examined these data points exploring when cannabis was legalized vs. when retail sales began. Additionally, while you can have a cannabis overdose it’s not remotely fatal while an overdose of alcohol can cause lasting damage and even death. Weed is not without its pitfalls but alcohol is by far more problematic. Alcohol and cannabis are vastly different but often get lumped together because they are intoxicants.
Most states now allow medical or recreational marijuana, though it remains illegal at the federal level. In November, Florida voters will decide on a constitutional amendment allowing recreational cannabis, and the federal government is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. Using weed before drinking alcohol may minimize the effects of alcohol. This means you might be tipsier than you feel, increasing your risk for becoming overly intoxicated. While there’s some research around the effects of drinking alcohol before using weed, there isn’t much about the opposite approach. Except for going out in public, people were much more inclined to carry on normally if they’d ingested marijuana compared to drinking alcohol.
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“I think the headlines regarding this study may lead people to think that marijuana use does not pose a risk. The study is only saying that decreasing the integrity or volume of white and gray matter may not be one of the ways that marijuana affects one’s health,” Maxwell said. Daily marijuana use raises the risk of stroke by 42% and heart attack by 25%, even if there is no prior history of heart disease and the person has never smoked or vaped tobacco, according to a February 2024 study. Chronic or excessive alcohol consumption is known to affect balance and disrupts normal walking patterns. This is because alcohol can damage parts of the brain responsible for coordination, including the cerebellum.
Plus, a similar (but equally small) 2010 study found that alcohol consumption didn’t have much of an effect on THC concentrations. Occasionally mixing alcohol and weed — also known as crossfading — likely won’t lead to major health problems. But there are a lot of variables to consider, including which one you use first and how you consume them. “They’ve been able to measure that cannabis intake, in whatever form, can activate these receptors, and they actually end up having some potential negative effects, especially physiologically,” Brandt said. Although cannabis is less addicting than some drugs, it can be as severe as other substances.
Before getting into comparing alcohol and weed, it’s important to understand some of the factors that make the comparison tricky. There’s also some divergence within the specific categories of harm. But alcohol’s crime risk is due to its tendency to make people more aggressive (and more prone to committing crime), while heroin’s crime risk is based on the massive criminal trafficking network behind it. It might seem harmless to mix alcohol and weed, but doing so can be a slippery slope toward getting overly intoxicated. But if you’ve been drinking a lot, it might be hard to tell the difference between a green out and alcohol poisoning, which can be life-threatening if not treated. When mixing weed and alcohol, there are a lot of other variables to consider in addition to which one you use first.
Many cannabis-infused drinks list THC as an ingredient, and while there is no standard dose, 5 milligrams (mg) is typically used in research studies of the drug. Some “low-dose” beverages contain 2 to 4 mg of THC in an 8-ounce container. The drinks may also contain caffeine, alcohol, or other substances. Green Health Docs’ mission is to combat the nation’s opioid epidemic. As a team of pain medicine physicians, anesthesiologists, and surgeons, we knew that there had to be a better way to help patients. Our goal was to give patients easy access to medical cannabis as an alternative to traditional pain medications, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, and other addictive and harmful drugs.
The individual scores account for a host of variables, including mortality, dependence, drug-related family adversities, environmental damage, and effect on crime. If you take medication, talk to your doctor before using weed, alcohol, or both. They may weaken the effectiveness of your medication or increase your risk for certain side effects. But if you do decide to mix the two, start slow and keep track of how much you’re consuming of each. Weed appeared to slow down the rise of blood alcohol levels after consuming a high dose of alcohol. For example, a 1992 study had 15 participants smoke a placebo, a high dose of THC, or a low dose of THC on three occasions.
