Science Confirms What We've Always Known: Weed Makes You Chill, Booze Gets You Riled Up

The conventional wisdom regarding the link alcohol and weed have towards aggression has always been that ‘weed makes you chill’ and ‘alcohol fuels rage’. Society has held mostly true to these ideas for generations without testing whether or not it’s a legitimate phenomenon.

But how do you test that phenomenon? Do you just get a bunch of people drunk and high and introduce them to aggression-inducing situations? Well, it turns out that’s exactly what a group of scientists did, and, unsurprisingly, they found that weed makes people chill as fuck while booze acts as a catalyst for aggression.

via Springer/Psychopharmacology:

Methods
Heavy alcohol (n = 20) and regular cannabis users (n = 21), and controls (n = 20) were included in a mixed factorial study. Alcohol and cannabis users received single doses of alcohol and placebo or cannabis and placebo, respectively. Subjective aggression was assessed before and after aggression exposure consisting of administrations of the point-subtraction aggression paradigm (PSAP) and the single category implicit association test (SC-IAT). Testosterone and cortisol levels in response to alcohol/cannabis treatment and aggression exposure were recorded as secondary outcome measures.
Results
Subjective aggression significantly increased following aggression exposure in all groups while being sober. Alcohol intoxication increased subjective aggression whereas cannabis decreased the subjective aggression following aggression exposure. Aggressive responses during the PSAP increased following alcohol and decreased following cannabis relative to placebo. Changes in aggressive feeling or response were not correlated to the neuroendocrine response to treatments.
Conclusions
It is concluded that alcohol facilitates feelings of aggression whereas cannabis diminishes aggressive feelings in heavy alcohol and regular cannabis users, respectively.

Let me synthesize those results for you:

Weed makes you chill AF and do things like listen to Phish.

Alcohol, in the presence of aggression, makes you want to storm the field and rip down the goal posts.