Pubdate: Sun, 01 Sep 2013
Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
Copyright: 2013 Austin American-Statesman
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Author: Rochelle Koff, Politifact Florida

TOXICITY-WISE, POT SAFER THAN BOOZE

At the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race, a big screen displayed an ad 
headlined: "A new beer?"

"If you're an adult who enjoys a good beer," crowd members saw, 
"there's a similar product you might want to know about, one without 
all the calories and serious health problems. Less toxic so it 
doesn't cause hangovers or overdose deaths. And it's not linked to 
violence or reckless behavior. Marijuana. Less harmful than alcohol." 
Less toxic? Of course, Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project, 
which produced the ad, said by email: "If you consume too much 
alcohol in a sitting or over the course of your life, you can die. If 
you consume too much (marijuana) in a sitting or over the course of 
your life, you do not die."

The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes each drug distinctly.

Alcohol in small doses may start as a stimulant, but the institute 
describes it as a depressant rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream 
from the stomach and small intestine. Intoxication can impair brain 
function and motor skills; heavy use can increase disease risks.

Marijuana's main mind-altering chemical is 
delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. When marijuana is smoked, THC 
quickly passes from the lungs into the bloodstream, which carries the 
chemical to the brain and other organs.

Statistics underscore alcohol's possible lethal impact, while experts 
have reported no data on marijuana-induced deaths.

The federal Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health 
Statistics tallied 41,682 deaths due to alcohol in 2010, the latest 
year with exact statistics. That broke out to 15,990 deaths from 
alcoholic liver disease and 25,692 other deaths - and that was 
leaving out accidents and homicides.

We identified another way of comparing the two.

Robert Gable, a retired professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate 
University in California, compared the toxicity of 20 abused 
substances using reports of experimental human and animal research 
and on published data of overdose fatalities.

He devised a safety ratio - the ratio of an effective dose (eliciting 
a "relaxed affability") to a lethal dose. "Two drinks makes you 
buzzy, 20 drinks puts you in the emergency room or the morgue," Gable 
said by phone. "Ten is the safety ratio" for alcohol, among the most 
toxic recreational drugs, he said.

The least physiologically toxic substances - those requiring 100 to 
1,000 times the effective dose to cause death - included marijuana 
when ingested. He couldn't find documented deaths from smoked 
marijuana, "so the actual dose is a mystery."

"No drug is good for teenagers," he said, "but when it comes to the 
chances of immediate death by chemical toxicity, marijuana is about a 
hundred times less toxic than alcohol or cocaine." Our ruling: 
Hospital trips and deaths are more likely due to alcohol. Also, a 
study found marijuana is 100 times less toxic, though this is not to 
say that it is invariably less harmful.

We rate this claim as Mostly True.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom