Great news out of the world of science. Compared to all the other drugs that you are doing, it’s most likely your consumption and abuse of alcohol will bring death to your doorstep.
Hooray, I say.
But also, fear not about overdosing on heroin, falling off a building while tripping on mushrooms or dying of heart failure after ingesting Adderral for eight straight days trying to finish a school project.
Nope, it’s gonna be the booze that gets ya.
From a WonkBlog piece on the deadliness of our nation’s deadliest drugs.
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.
The piece was more focused on the overall safeness of marijuana, so it didn’t talk much about alcohol. But rest easy knowing that your weed won’t kill you. The study, from Scientific Reports, sought to calculate which drug had the closest ratio of what you need to get fucked up compared to what would end your life.
Alcohol is all the way at the top of that list. In fact, it’s the only one that’s super, super concerning.
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 [less risk].
Way on the much, much less risk end was marijuana. Back to WonkBlog.
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 low mortality risk to its users.
The order goes:
1. Alcohol
2. Heroin
3. Cocaine
4. Tobacco
5. Ecstasy
6. Meth
7. Marijuana.
So yea, alcohol will kill you. But that’s okay. It’s probably indicative of how little a desire we have to be alive that we readily and willingly allow the entire world to consume the one thing that will kill us most. And this study on its deadliness doesn’t even factor in the myraid other ways booze can kill, such as drinking and driving.
Humanity! Huzzah!