Some people feel fine after small and sometimes even large amounts of THC. “They may feel uneasy or anxious and their heart rate and blood pressure may rise. Nausea and vomiting are also possible, and some people even become paranoid and agitated,” says Dr. Gruber. But cigarette smoking plays a complicated role in studying the impact of marijuana smoke, Baler said.
Marijuana may be harder on your heart, while moderate drinking could be beneficial.
Akin to this, cannabis use can also affect coordination and motor skills because THC can interfere with the functioning of specific sections of the brain like the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. Our clinicians have all been hand-selected and personally trained by Dr. Amen, whose mission is to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. Over the last 30-plus years, ACI has built the world’s largest database of functional brain scans—over 250,000 SPECT scans on patients from 155 countries—related to how people think, feel, and behave.
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Alcohol’s effects on behavior can also lead to more crime, while marijuana use appears to have little-to-no effect. Alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. But various studies found marijuana doesn’t make users more aggressive or lead to crime. Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, gave the example of an alien race visiting Earth and asking which land animal is the biggest. If the question is about weight, the African elephant is the biggest land animal.
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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. Chronic alcohol use can lead to liver diseases such as fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and cirrhosis, gastritis and pancreatitis. In general, marijuana is considered less harmful than alcohol but alcohol can be considered more socially acceptable.
On the other side of the coin, researchers have found that cannabinoids — which are the active compounds in marijuana — could help to prevent migraine, and a more recent study linked marijuana use to an increased sex drive. In his clinical experience, Maxwell said, smoking pot can exacerbate existing anxiety and depression, as well as psychotic conditions. Studies have found a connection between increased psychotic episodes and regular pot use. Hutchison’s study, he said, was different than other studies in the fact that he looked at gray and white matter across all regions of the brain, and also compared the two vices.
- This means you might be tipsier than you feel, increasing your risk for becoming overly intoxicated.
- “It can increase or decrease effectiveness or levels of medicine that you’re taking.
- A lot of research has also linked adolescent marijuana use with a range of negative consequences, including cognitive deficiencies and worse educational outcomes.
- Sian Ferguson is a freelance health and cannabis writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Therefore, B began using hemp-based gummies laced with delta-9, the most abundant form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the part of the cannabis plant that creates a high. The synthetic form used in edibles is called delta-9 THC-O acetate. “We know that moderate alcohol consumption has health risks, and risk increases as alcohol consumption increases,” Boyd said in an email. In sheer numbers, of course, many more people still drink alcohol on occasion than use marijuana, which is now legal for recreational use in 24 states and Washington, DC, and for medical use in 38 states and DC. Smoking marijuana is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes, experts say.
More than 37 percent of people said they used marijuana to help them sleep. Marijuana users were also more likely than alcohol drinkers to say they used marijuana when bored or needed to inspire creativity. In contrast, “we don’t see any statistically significant effects of cannabis on gray matter or white matter,” Hutchison said.
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That said, the legal status of a substance doesn’t tell the whole story. Part of the problem is the challenge of untangling marijuana use from the use of other substances, especially What is Powdered Alcohol and is it Dangerous alcohol, Hutchison said. Another problem is determining whether the drug actually causes the brain changes that are observed. Similar to drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana results in intoxication and users report feelings of happiness, confusion, relaxation, impulsiveness and hunger.
In fact, the alcohol-induced death rate for both sexes jumped 26% between 2019 and 2020, the first year of the pandemic. After a few months of total sobriety, however, B began to experiment with cannabis gummies and found them easy to incorporate with a nonalcoholic drink or two. A couple of studies found that men who use marijuana regularly had more problems with erectile dysfunction and needed medication to counteract that side effect.
Over 84% of American adults say they’ve consumed alcohol at some point in their lives. And nearly 64% of Americans aged 12 and over say they’ve had a drink in the past year, as reported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). The brain-imaging work at Amen Clinics and recent research suggest that neither one is good for you. There is no known medical use for consumed alcohol, but there are health benefits observed in moderate drinkers, including lower rates of cardiovascular disease and possibly fewer colds, Murray said.
