Marijuana surpasses alcohol in daily use for Americans, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Marijuana surpasses alcohol in daily use for Americans, study finds

washingtonpost.com

27 pointsMilnerRoute58 comments

>title about record-setting marijuana use

>wrong article linked

heh

To be fair, when you go around scrolling on these roided news webapps, they switch around to other articles as you pass articles, and change the URL too!

The linked article, "Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem.", is more interesting. It's becoming clear that solar and wind power have to be paired with batteries once the intermittent sources start to dominate. Fortunately, batteries are much cheaper than a few years ago, and get cheaper every year.

The article doesn't mention that California has a solar battery rebate program.[1] How's that working out? Rebate plans have to be carefully designed so that panels and batteries are installed in the right proportions.

[1] https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/california-sgip-battery-re...

Skip the middleman, use all that free juice to grow more pot.

Make a big sheet of whatever the stuff inside of fibre optics is made of, and just plug that bad boy into a frame in the roof. Light should go straight through. Skips at least two more middlemen.

But you go from 24 hrs of light down to 5-6 decent hours at northern latitudes

Cannabis Tops Alcohol as Americans' Daily Drug of Choice

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/well/mind/marijuana-canna...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40461539

I'm not surprised, most alcoholic beverages are horribly repulsive, both in taste and effect. Cannabis tastes better and has a much nicer effect.

As a large bonus: it's healthier for the user and those around them too.

Depends a lot on how you consume it: if you smoke it, then it's more harmful than alcohol just because of the combustion phenomenon.

By other means it's true that it's less harmful than alcohol in average, but there's a big caveat for people with a psychiatric background in their family, as the risk of drug induces mental health issue (schizophrenia) can be very high in that case.

> if you smoke it, then it's more harmful than alcohol just because of the combustion phenomenon.

Even then it's not. Alcohol is remarkably bad for you.

You underestimate how harmful inhaling combustion products is.

That doesn't mean alcohol isn't bad.

Its a myth that alcohol does not induce psychosis. Just like using weed everyday, using alcohol everyday can induce a psychosis. Even when in moderate amounts. That being said. I think cannabis does something to motivation of people that alcohol does not.

As can software engineers' drug of choice: caffeine.

I found out, years after deciding to cut back on my coffee intake, that my dose was in that range: when the only thing you drink is instant coffee (as in, not even plain water) and you're making it will multiple table spoons per cup instead of teaspoons…

Funny enough, instant coffee has less caffeine than fresh brewed coffee.

Only when following the instructions correctly, not when using treble the serving suggestion per cup.

Passive smoking is not healthy, plus I'd trust more on the wheel someone who just drank a glass of beer over someone who just smoked a cannabis joint.

Not to mention the stench of weed smokers...

You'd prefer the lovely smells and sounds of angry, vomiting drunks with poor impulse control?

Fewer people with a drink and vomit on them, then the instant stench that pervades every piece of furniture

I'm not aware of a standardised unit of weed, but there is one for alcohol.

For this specific reason, I expect higher variation from weed — though I also wouldn't trust either to drive a car.

One beer and one entire joint are not equivalent in levels of intoxication.

Try 6 beers vs 1 entire joint and maybe you're getting somewhere close to equivalence in level of intoxication.

Most people don't smoke an entire joint in one sitting. All it takes is about 3 or 4 puffs and that's typically enough for quite a while. That's the equivalent of about 2 beers. And I'd trust someone more behind the wheel that had a few puffs of a joint vs. someone who just drank 2 or 3 beers.

The kind of intoxication is very different between alcohol and THC. There is no way to do a 1:1 comparison as far as effects on driving ability. They each act on very different pathways, and produce different results.

Marijuana also never made anyone pass out while driving from smoking too much, but alcohol definitely can do that.

Many people use marijuana for sleep. Are you really sure no one has ever fallen asleep at the wheel due to marijuana use? It seems like a bold claim.

Marijuana and alcohol differ significantly when taken in large quantities. Alcohol will make a person pass out without exception. Marijuana does not specifically make a person pass out at high doses. You would need to take a low dose of marijuana to use it as a sleep aid.

I doubt breathing in carcinogens is better than drinking them.

Specifically for alcohol and cannabis it is. There are healthier ways to take cannabis thankfully as well.

[citation needed]

Most are an acquired taste, which in my youth I called bullshit on. Alas,

Repulsive?

I don't think that's the main reason at all.

More like your reason

That’s a matter of taste. Cannabis gives me terrible anxiety even if I breath it from someone next to me. While beer (good ales that is) I find lovely and the effect is nice and slow and continues.

Also, personally I saw more people falling of things and getting wounded on too much cannabis than alcohol. I (from NL) have a friend who smoked a bunch of spliffs before his factory shift and now he has no right arm; he simply dozed off and his arm got caught in the machine. They had to amputate.

What was the machine?

This was the early 90s so I wouldn’t know the brand or anything, but it was a machine that made metal sheet into cylinders. I wasn’t there but I was in the train he rode that morning when you could smoke spliffs in the train.

The comparison comments (including yours) are a false dichotomy. Your friend would not have an arm remaining even if he were to have subbed with alcohol.

However he would if neither. So it's less a question of what's better.

This may not be an alcohol vs marijuana thing directly, but the social pressure against being drunk on the job is significantly higher than the social pressure against being stoned.

Sure but in NL when I lived there it was fairly normal to be stoned in uni or at work; drunk was weird.

I believe there's a general consensus that you shouldn't operate heavy machinery if you are impaired in any way, be it alcohol, pot or OTC antihistamines.

Sure, just saying I personally know more cannabis accidents. Not saying it’s because it’s worse; it’s just statement of fact for what I have seen in my life.

I never heard of lethal traffic accidents because of cannabis, but lots of those because of alcohol.

Yeah, did you read the word personally in my comments?

Are you saying him working intoxicated by alcohol would have been safer?

No, I say that, and getting tired of typing this now, I personally know more people hurt or dead because of cannabis than alcohol. It’s a statement of a fact of my life. YMMV obviously. I was raised in a town where stoned vastly outstripped alcohol. Not saying, unlike you, one is better than the other and I prefer alcohol (well, beer), but i definitely know more cannabis injuries and deaths than alcohol so let’s not say it’s harmless.

I don’t drink nor smoke weed anymore so I don’t have a dog in this fight.

What I do know is that the guy in the restaurant drinking at a table 3 feet away from me has 0 impact on my enjoyment, but if someone is smoking a joint 20 feet away with the windows open during the summer it’s gonna hit me hard and smell disgusting.

I thought public cigarette smoking was bad, but the second hand marijuana smell is way worse and for some reason just seems to linger far more than the cigarette smell.

That's just your opinion. But since you're open to anecdotes, I have the opposite opinion.

Cigarette smoke gives me an instant headache, and I can smell it a mile a way. I'm not even kidding. If someone is upwind from me a mile away smoking a cig, I'll know about it. And the smoke lingers in hair, clothes, walls, furniture, everywhere far worse than marijuana smoke ever could - I mean, cigarette smoke is pretty famous for fouling up everything it touches, but marijuana smoke doesn't, at least not permanently or long-term.

Many people also quite like the smell of marijuana smoke, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who enjoys the smell of cigarettes.

And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering.

Alcohol is usually far better at all of that for me. For grief particularly (and I've tried this a few times), alcohol has made me feel far better than my initial state, whereas Marijuana amplified the pain from grief by a couple orders of magnitude.

Seeing Brave New World references every time drugs are mentioned is tiring and pretentious. There is plenty to be said about the virtues of moderation and abstinence, and none of it involves invoking the most over-referenced book in modern history not written by Orwell.

[dupe]

More discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40457054

link should be https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/05/23/marijuana...

Flagged because the link is wrong...

Here's a (non-paywalled) version of the original Washington Post article...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/marijuana-surpasses-alc...

Nice. Empirically it seems clear stoned people are way less prone to aggressive behaviour, anger and don't get nearly as much health damage as habitual drunkards do. I feel excited waiting for this to visibly change states statistics in violent crime and liver health, perhaps even dampen the growth of hard drugs consumption. Nevertheless I am worried people will eat more sweets this way contributing to obesity prevalence.

There are many angles of this. Different eating habits is one of those. Driving is another. I am not sure what is the long term impact but I guess we are going to find out.

That argument holds water in a false dichotomy. There are other options such as non addiction

Didn’t read the first line of the article:

> frequent alcohol consumption has remained stable

A bad thing remaining stable is kinda Ok. Slower growth is great and we are yet to observe it.

> Empirically it seems clear stoned people are way less prone to aggressive behaviour

Or is that just the stoner stereotype? Anecdotally I have seen plenty of angry stoners (some verging on schizoid) although I'm unsure of correlation versus causation.

If there is a certain percentage of agressive angry guys and gals then perhaps weed versus alcohol doesn't move the needle.

And most people I know do (a) both to excess or (b) don't excessively abuse either weed nor alcohol.

The problem with this belief is that as the linked article shows, the increase in marijuana consumption has not been accompanied by a decrease in alcohol consumption, which has remained stable.

So we’re still stuck with all the risks of the habitual drunkards, but now also have all the risks of the habitual stoners.

I speculate the following with confidence:

At least some people who used to drink will move to smoking marijuana and give up drinking (I hope this is clear, the only questionable part is how many, it indeed is likely this number is going to be negligibly small).

A bigger proportion of adolescents who would be going to start drinking habitually will instead start smoking marijuana and won't acquire a habit of consuming alcohol.

You may be right about future generations.

But the data referred to in this article itself, shows that alcohol consumption hasn’t gone down. So your speculation is not true today at least.

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