Alcohol, when used alone, is "involved" in far more emergency department visits than every illegal drug combined. According to the Centers for Disease Control, "In the single year 2005, there were more than 1.6 million hospitalizations and more than 4 million emergency room visits for alcohol-related conditions." A study published this year in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, meanwhile, suggests that as many as 50 percent of emergency room visits could be alcohol-related. And that number is only going up. In New York City, for instance, "nearly 74,000 people wound up in hospitals in 2009 for alcohol-related reasons, compared with just 22,000 in 2003."
Yes the most lethal (by number of fatalities) recreational drug in the USA is ethyl hydroxide. It's a poison that results in a physical addiction coupled with emotional instability and impaired judgement.
Skipjack wrote:Yeah, it is also used by a lot more people....
If we could only switch them to pot:
The research by professors at the University of Colorado-Denver, Montana State University and the University of Oregon looked at traffic deaths from 1990 to 2009 in all 50 states, including the 16 that passed medical marijuana laws.
"Legalization is associated with nearly a 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities, most likely as a result of its impact on alcohol consumption by young adults," the researchers said in the report, published in November.
Advocates of a medical-marijuana law could tout the study's findings as a societal benefit of legalization. Opponents, however, could say that the study shows what they've argued all along — that a medical-marijuana law makes marijuana more available for recreational use.
Doesn't matter that more used alcohol. No one has ever died from a pot overdose in 5,000 years of recorded history. It is the safest recreational drug known to man. We should be doing everything in our power to get alcohol users to switch to pot. Short of forcing people to use it.
As to recreational use of other drugs. Once they are in the system - legal or illegal we are going to have to deal with them. Might as well run them through a regulated system vs having them distributed by criminals. It will be safer. For all concerned.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
I did not mention it, but I am still wondering what was up with the guy from Florida that ate someones face off. They say all he had in his blood was marijuana. No bathsalts...
Not saying that marijuana makes people do that. There is no other evidence for it that I know off. It is just weird.
Either way, I do have to wonder why people would want to take a drug (bath salts) that is known to make people go psycho like that.
I still think it was tetrodotoxin and witches cucumber that made him eat that guys face. With all these zombie movies on tv the kids are bound to try and turn themselves into the walking dead using Haitian necromancy.
It's actually physically impossible to OD off canibis. You would have to smoke 20 lbs of it in 15m to absorb enough THC into your blood to be lethal, you'd pass out from lack of oxygen long before you'd OD on pot. Only way researchers were able to kill lab mice with it was extracting THC from the plant and injecting a lethal dose directly.
Honestly the worst you can expect would be lung cancer from breathing in the carcinogens from the paper / plant, just like tobacco. Of course using a water purification method would arrest that issue.
My mother became a step-daughter in a family of alcoholics growing up, with the result that she flat out hated the stuff. My experience was being part of the 5% of students in a high school that never used drugs(especially marijuana), surrounded by the 95% that viewed non-users as pariah.
Got out of that town as soon as possible and never looked back. It's been economically downhill all the way for that burg, nothing new to show for itself except grow-ops.
It's actually physically impossible to OD off canibis. You would have to smoke 20 lbs of it in 15m to absorb enough THC into your blood to be lethal, you'd pass out from lack of oxygen long before you'd OD on pot. Only way researchers were able to kill lab mice with it was extracting THC from the plant and injecting a lethal dose directly.
Honestly the worst you can expect would be lung cancer from breathing in the carcinogens from the paper / plant, just like tobacco. Of course using a water purification method would arrest that issue.
Dr. Gabriel Nahas recently died. He was notorious for asphyxiating monkeys with pot smoke (sans oxygen) to prove the drug was no good for you. Monkeys all over the world breathed a sigh of relief.
And you might not get cancer from smoking a lot of pot. It has anti-tumor properties.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
