Still not as deadly as alcohol, heroin, or cocaine
Scientific Reports has published a
study on the risk of death associated with commonly used, recreational substances. The Washington Post puts the
findings like so:
They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.
And all the way at the bottom of the list? Weed — roughly 114 times less deadly than booze, according to the authors, who ran calculations that compared lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses. Marijuana is also the only drug studied that posed a low mortality risk to its users.
This doesn't mean you should go out to your local marijuana bar or grocery store and buy a bunch of "grass" (as the kids used to say) to give to your children. It just reinforces the opinion, held by a growing number of people on both sides of the aisle, that marijuana's criminalization is ludicrous.