New Study Shows Marijuana Is 114 Times Safer Than the Deadliest Legal Drug in the U.S. (4 articles)

[Purple Power]

New Study Shows Marijuana Is 114 Times Safer Than the Deadliest Legal Drug in the U.S.



By <a class="" href="http://mic.com/profiles/173820/gregory-krieg" title="Gregory Krieg's Profile">Gregory Krieg</a>
February 23, 2015

<p class="">The deadliest drug in America is legal in all 50 states, and it's significantly more dangerous than a range of illegal substances much more heavily regulated and policed.

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<p class="">According to research recently published in<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150130/srep08126/full/srep08126.html">Scientific Reports</a><i></i>and spotted by the <i><a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/23/marijuana-may-be-even-safer-than-previously-thought-researchers-say/">Washington Post</a>,</i>alcohol is approximately 114 times more dangerous than marijuana, which remains the only federally controlled substance that has <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://mic.com/articles/104254/congressman-reminds-us-how-many-people-have-died-from-marijuana-overdoses">never</a> caused a death by overdose. The authors of the study assessed the "comparative risk" of death that accompanies consuming everything from weed to meth and heroin and found that marijuana is even safer, relative to those harder drugs, than they previously believed.

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Researchers drew these conclusions based on something called "margin of exposure," which measures the likelihood of an average user accidentally ingesting a toxic dose. The lower the ratio, the smaller the margin for error, and the easier it is to consume a harmful dose.



As you can see in the chart below, marijuana's average margin for error represented by the red bar is much higher than that of other drugs, meaning the likelihood of consuming a harmful dose is lower. The margin for error for alcohol, meanwhile, is very low, reflecting a much higher risk of harmful consumption. The greatest threat to your personal health is on tap tonight at the local bar:

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</div> Source:<a class="" href="http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150130/srep08126/full/srep08126.html">Nature</a>

Under the <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.fda.gov/regulatoryinformation/legislation/ucm148726.htm">Controlled Substances Act of 1970</a>, marijuana, which researchers<i></i>found to be the safest of the drugs tested, is ranked alongside Schedule I designees heroin, Ecstasy and LSD. By the <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/812">letter of the law</a>, that would suggest that cannabis has "the high potential for abuse," no medicinal value and no accepted means for being ingested safely under a doctor's supervision. Marijuana, as studies over the course of a decade have <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://mic.com/articles/89227/8-biggest-lies-we-have-to-stop-telling-about-marijuana">continually found</a>, defies all three qualifications.



<b>Ignoring the real threat:</b> To give you an idea of how baffling federal drug law is, consider that two of the four most deadly substances alcohol and tobacco are lightly regulated and available at most grocers and corner shops. Cocaine is lumped in with theoretically less dangerous Schedule II drugs in part because <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://directionsindentistry.net/cocaine-dentistry-local-anesthetic/">dentists</a>, in a practice mostly abandoned at the end of the 19th century,once used it as a topical numbing agent. From that, the lawderives that cocaine has a "currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States."



Heroin is the second deadliest substance, trailing only alcohol in the Scientific Reports study, but the drugs most likely to create a taste for it Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin, to name a few are being prescribed by physicians at a staggering rate. Researchers at George Washington University <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://smhs.gwu.edu/news/researchers-find-significant-increase-painkillers-prescribed-us-adults-visiting-emergency">found</a> that "between 2001 and 2010, the percentage of overall emergency department visits where an opioid analgesic was prescribed increased from 20.8% to 31%" and that prescription rates for "Dilaudid, one of the most potent yet addictive medications, went up 668.2%."



Not that any of this should come as news to,................



<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://mic.com/articles/111142/new-study-shows-marijuana-is-114-times-safer-than-the-deadliest-legal-drug-in-the-u-s?utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange">http://mic.com/articles/111142/new-study-shows-marijuana-is-114-times-safer-than-the-deadliest-legal-drug-in-the-u-s?utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange</a>

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Marijuana May Be The Least Dangerous Recreational Drug, Study ShowsPosted:
02/24/2015



<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-ferner/">Matt Ferner</a>





Marijuana is far safer than alcohol, tobacco and multiple other illicit substances, researchers say, and strict, legal regulation of cannabis might be a more reasonable approach than current prohibitions.



Those are the findings of a new <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/#b3">report</a> published in Scientific Reports that compares the lethality of the recreational use of 10 common drugs, including marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, diazepam, amphetamine and methadone.



Researchers found that marijuana has the lowest risk of mortality and is safer than the commonly used alcohol and tobacco as well as the rest of the drugs in the study. They determined the risk of mortality by comparing the lethal dose of each substance with a commonly used amount of each substance.



The finding that marijuana has the lowest risk when compared with the other drugs is not surprising -- previous research had found that <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-pot/">marijuana is a substantially safer recreational drug</a> than other commonly used recreational drugs examined in this study. That finding stands in stark contrast to the lethal risk of alcohol, which the researchers found to be potentially more deadly than heroin.



Marijuana is so much less risky than alcohol and tobacco that the researchers say their results point toward developing policies that prioritize managing the risks associated with alcohol and tobacco, rather than the illicit drugs in the study. Further, the low risk of cannabis use suggests government should use "a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach" to manage the substance, the researchers write......................


<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/24/marijuana-safer-than-alcohol-tobacco_n_6738572.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/24/marijuana-safer-than-alcohol-tobacco_n_6738572.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063</a>

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Study: Marijuana much safer than alcoholby <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://kobi5.com/about/news-team/matt-jordan-bio/item/matt-jordan-bio.html" title="Matt Jordan">Matt Jordan</a>, Posted: Wed, February 25 2015







Medford, Ore -- Are you more likely to overdose on alcohol than heroine?



A new international study suggests some legal substances could be more deadly than illegal ones, and marijuana may be safer than previously thought.



The study in Scientific Reports journal looks at one main thing, how deadly is a drug?



The Study - <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/">Scientific Reports </a>(below)



The results show alcohol as more lethal than even meth or heroin and over a hundred times more deadly than weed.



"The chances for mortality from other drugs is much much higher than for marijuana," said Medical Expert Dr. Robin Miller.



As July 1st approaches,......





<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://kobi5.com/news/local-news/item/study-marijuana-much-safer-than-alcohol.html#.VO9DyS69OSY">http://kobi5.com/news/local-news/item/study-marijuana-much-safer-than-alcohol.html#.VO9DyS69OSY</a>

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<div><div>
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<div>Sci Rep. 2015; 5: 8126.

Published online 2015 Jan 30. doi: <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038%2Fsrep08126">10.1038/srep08126</a>

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PMCID: PMC4311234
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</div></div> Comparative risk assessment of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illicit drugs using the margin of exposure approach Abstract


<p class="">A comparative risk assessment of drugs including alcohol and tobacco using the margin of exposure (MOE) approach was conducted. The MOE is defined as ratio between toxicological threshold (benchmark dose) and estimated human intake. Median lethal dose values from animal experiments were used to derive the benchmark dose. The human intake was calculated for individual scenarios and population-based scenarios. The MOE was calculated using probabilistic Monte Carlo simulations. The benchmark dose values ranged from 2mg/kg bodyweight for heroin to 531mg/kg bodyweight for alcohol (ethanol). For individual exposure the four substances alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and heroin fall into the high risk category with MOE < 10, the rest of the compounds except THC fall into the risk category with MOE < 100. On a population scale, only alcohol would fall into the high risk category, and cigarette smoking would fall into the risk category, while all other agents (opiates, cocaine, amphetamine-type stimulants, ecstasy, and benzodiazepines) had MOEs > 100, and cannabis had a MOE > 10,000. The toxicological MOE approach validates epidemiological and social science-based drug ranking approaches especially in regard to the positions of alcohol and tobacco (high risk) and cannabis (low risk).

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Compared to medicinal products or other consumer products, risk assessment of drugs of abuse has been characterised as deficient, much of this is based on historical attribution and emotive reasoning^{<a class="" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/#b1">1</a>}. The available data are often a matter of educated guesses supplemented by some reasonably reliable survey data from the developed nations^{<a class="" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/#b2">2</a>}. Only in the past decade, have there been some approaches to qualitatively and quantitatively classify the risk of drugs of abuse. These efforts tried to overcome legislative classifications, which were often found to lack a scientific basis^{<a class="" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/#b3">3</a>}. UNODC suggested the establishment of a so-called Illicit Drug Index (IDI), which contained a combination of a dose index (the ratio between the typical dose and a lethal dose) and a toxicology index (concentration levels in the blood of people who died from overdose compared with the,....................



<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/</a>

[Purple Power]

Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say New study: We should stop fighting marijuana legalization and focus on alcohol and tobacco instead

By <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/christopher-ingraham">Christopher Ingraham</a>

February 23


Compared with other recreational drugs including alcohol marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use.



Those are the top-line findings of <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/">recent research</a> published in the journal <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.nature.com/srep/index.html">Scientific Reports</a>, a subsidiary ofNature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. 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 deadlythan booze,..................



<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/23/marijuana-may-be-even-safer-than-previously-thought-researchers-say/">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/23/marijuana-may-be-even-safer-than-previously-thought-researchers-say/</a>

[SomeRandomGuy]

I can definitely agree. There are no known over doses of cannabis alone. There are studies saying that the active alkaloids in cannabis make our cells perform better. We do have cannabinoid receptors all over our bodies. So i can see how this would work out and hope to see further studies. Cannabis when eaten provides powerful antioxidants to our system. Along with certain cannabinoids that target cancer cells and tell them to stop reproducing. Then there are also others that tell those same cells to die off and replace themselves with good ones. If you catch it early that is. Or as early as possible.

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