According to a new study, the obvious is true even if top government officials don’t want to admit it: weed is nowhere near as dangerous as legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes. The findings, published in Scientific Reports and reported by the Washington Post, show that pot is “roughly 114 times less deadly than booze.”
The research, which involved dosing a bunch of different animals with various drugs (but no human subjects), calculated how deadly a particular substance was. A junkie mouse, a coked-up dog, a stoned rat, and a drunk rabbit were among the many types of drugged-out creatures used for the experiment.
As noted by newspaper, the mortality risk was determined by comparing the “lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses.” Here’s how the drugs tested were ranked, from deadly to least deadly.
1) Alcohol
2) Heroin
3) Cocaine
4) Tobacco
5) Ecstasy
6) Meth
7) Weed
Shocker! “[T]he results confirm that the risk of cannabis may have been overestimated in the past,” while “the risk of alcohol may have been commonly underestimated,” say the authors of the study — without mentioning how these estimates are likely the result of successful lobbying. For those keeping score, alcohol, a widely available drug that’s legal and not even on the federal list of scheduled substances, is exponentially more dangerous than pot, an illegal drug (in 47 states, what up Alaska?) that’s classified as a Schedule 1 drug along with heroin and ecstasy.
The toxicity of weed was so minimal that it needed to be placed in a special “low-risk range,” unlike any of the other drugs surveyed. Based on the data, researches even suggested a “strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach” for pot. In layman’s terms, that’s very smart people making the argument that weed should be legalized.
(Photo: Prensa 420)
