← Back to context

Comment by semanticjudo

5 years ago

By just about any measure alcohol is a "harder" drug than marijuana but certainly more broadly acceptable.

i have had a theory for years if you sold any drug like meth or cocaine in an advil bottle with a label on the side saying “take at most 1 tablet every 4 hours, do not exceed 6 tablets in one day. do not use for more than 2 days in a row” etc then the vast majority of people would not have any issue with it. the people who are already abusing it would continue to abuse it. most people can be around hard addictive drugs ingrained in society like alcohol and do just fine

Having never done weed, if I smoke one will I preform worse at cognitive tasks than I would if I had a beer?

I know, comparing uppers and downers, not the same effects, etc.

  • It's difficult to say what an equivalent dose might be and this is just my experience, but...

    Definitely cognitive tasks would be considered more impaired by weed than beer, at "roughly equivalent to a pint" level. Likely neither would be a big deal.

    Weed is neither upper, nor downer really, it an hallucinogen.

    That means less ordered thinking. Quite possibly an increase in creativity and lateral concept matching (say, making or appreciating witty comments) but also an impairment to short term memory and direct logical reasoning.

    For motor skills and reaction times, beer definitely hits harder.

    • Oh, and on dosage, I'm from the UK. In my experience in the US a single joint is rolled to a potency I'd consider equivalent to "a mug full of whisky", not a pint of beer!

  • In my experience I can code on alcohol (unless I get completely shit faced.) Weed makes me more creative and I want to code more, but I also make a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t normally. This is why I quit cannabis, in math classes I would mess up simple things like forgetting to multiply by -1

  • They're not really comparable. It mostly comes down to dosage, if you have a beer I don't think you'll be much worse than if you were sober.