Is weed bad?

Coming from the stoner capitol of Texas, yes, yes, yes, yes in order.

Although in all of the above the yes rates as 'equivalent to alcohol' on the scale so draw your own conclusions.

"Bad?" In what sense? Lowering intraocular pressure in glaucoma? Relieving stress/depression? Helping pain (yes, the endocannabinoid system is implicated in pain-sensitivity)? It won't kill you either in overdose (unlike alcohol or, say, aspirin). Yes, it can be bad in certain respects, e.g. while doing tasks heavily dependent on mental faculties. But the answer to "is marijuana bad?" is certainly not "yes."

Chronic alcohol potentially causes brain atrophy (this is contentious, but at the very least it damages neural dendrites). Marijuana promotes neurogenesis--its negative effects on memory are heavily mediated by its activation of the endocannabinoid system that is responsible for selectively forgetting 'unnecessary' short-term memories, e.g. the color of the tables at McDonalds. Memory faculties are largely restored with time after quitting.

While marijuana can be psychologically addicting, quitting marijuana is, as expected, merely psychologically troubling. Alcohol on the other hand is also physically addicting, with acute withdrawal potentially causing seizure-related death. Hell, I find caffeine withdrawal more brutal than marijuana withdrawal.


The blanket "yes" answers are ignorant at best. My issue is mainly with your "alcohol equivalence" statement however.


I can support just about any of my above statements with the appropriate abstracts if you so wish (I'm lazy to pub-med them, must have been the pot!). There's probably a study out there comparing the negative effects of chronic pot vs. chronic ethanol in mice, and I'm certain of the outcome.



Also: Marijuana doesn't cause brain cell death, as one of the posts on the first page state. This is such an erroneous statement that I cringe every time I see/hear it. I challenge you to find a single scientific study that supports this. As stated above, marijuana promotes neurogenesis--the implications of this are not yet known.