What’s More Dangerous: Marijuana or Alcohol? (Rebroadcast)

Imagine that both substances were undiscovered until today. How would we think about their relative risks?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit SNHU.edu/freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it.

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hello, podcast listener. Time of year being what it is, we are off in Gestat, of course, skiing, or maybe in Martinique, tanning. Hard to keep track, you know? In any case, this week, we are rebroadcasting one of our most popular episodes of the past year, the past ever, actually. Hope you enjoy. Talk to you soon.

• 3:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's begin with a thought experiment. Imagine a fantasy world that's exactly as the world is today: smartphones, cars, podcasts, Jimmy Fallon at 11:35 PM. But two things are missing: alcohol and marijuana. They don't exist yet. Now, it may be hard to imagine that our civilization's gotten to this advanced stage without alcohol and marijuana, but that's a different thought experiment. That's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is this fantasy world, the one we have today without alcohol or marijuana, and then tomorrow, they are both discovered. What happens now? How are each of them used? And perhaps more important, how are each of them regulated?

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  If we were starting from scratch with no cultural or legal baggage, with no preconceptions, how would we weigh the relative benefits and especially the costs of marijuana versus alcohol?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Alcohol, I'm not so sure about alcohol. I wonder if alcohol was discovered today, I think people would be very concerned about the toxicity, and I suspect alcohol would be banned within 10 years if it became available today.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  If marijuana was discovered today, I think people would probably accept it.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Humankind loves alcohol.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  We should just start by saying that, that it is amazing how widespread alcohol use is, how much utility people get out of it. And we're going to focus on the negatives now, but I think you can't forget that basic point.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, we won't forget that basic point, but first, let's focus on the relative costs of alcohol and marijuana. Now, I don't mean the price. I'm talking about costs to society especially. If the world suddenly discovered both alcohol and marijuana tomorrow, how would we assess their effects? And how would we treat each of them?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  I'll give you the answer of what an economist would do, which is obviously very different than what a politician might do. But an economist would take the view that things that people do to themselves, maybe we shouldn't worry about very much, that all we need to worry about when it comes to alcohol and marijuana are the externalities. What negative effect of my consuming alcohol is there on the people around me, on society? And the same for marijuana. And those are numbers that you could imagine trying to quantify. And what an economist would say is, well, let's just build into the price of alcohol a tax that is appropriate to try to internalize that externality, and then to do the same thing with marijuana. And I think we maybe have less information about what the externalities are on marijuana.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  But my guess is that many people, probably rightly, would think that the externalities of marijuana are smaller than the externalities of alcohol.

• 6:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the reason that we have less information about the negative externalities of marijuana is because, in most places, it's illegal. And this does a few things. It makes it harder to collect reliable data. It dictates the nature of the market for marijuana. When you have an illicit market and the profits that go along with it, you have the potential for criminal activity and violence and other costs to society, like the police and the jails you need to devote to marijuana. According to the FBI, roughly half of all drug arrests in the US are for marijuana offenses. Forty-two percent for possession and 6% for sale or manufacturing. But as we all know, marijuana is becoming legal in more places.

• 7:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  In Colorado and Washington State here in the US, in 2001, Portugal decriminalized personal possession of many drugs, including marijuana. President Obama, quite famously now, told David Remnick of The New Yorker that, quote, "I don't think it," meaning marijuana, "is more dangerous than alcohol." All right, so let's start there with something we can measure pretty well. How dangerous is alcohol?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  It's a significant factor in high blood pressure and heart damage. It's the most damaging drug to the brain.

• 7:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's David Nutt. He's a psychiatrist at Imperial College London and former chairman of the UK's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Emphasis on "former chairman," we'll get to that in a minute.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  It's one of the most addictive substances, and it's associated with a whole range of different cancers. So overall, alcohol is responsible for shortening the life expectancy, accelerating death in over 3 million people in the world today. It's the leading cause of death in the world today, after tobacco.

• 8:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nutt worked in government for 10 years trying to assess the relative dangers of all different sorts of drugs.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And all the time I was trying to get evidence to dominate decision making, which is what the law says it should do. And all the time I was meeting resistance. And eventually I got sacked.

• 8:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why did David Nutt get fired?

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Now, the government's chief advisor on drugs policy has been sacked after insisting that alcohol and cigarettes are more dangerous than cannabis and ecstasy. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, said he no longer had confidence in the advice being given by Professor David Nutt, who'd also criticized ministers for reclassifying cannabis as a more serious drug.

• 9:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you can see which side of the debate David Nutt would land on in our marijuana versus alcohol thought experiment. And it isn't just the personal downsides of alcohol consumption, it's the externalities, the societal costs. Drunk driving, for instance. In the US, there are roughly 10,000 alcohol-related driving deaths a year, roughly a third of total traffic deaths. Drinking is heavily correlated with other antisocial behaviors.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  We know that alcohol is strongly associated with acquisitive crime, burglary, with violence generally, particularly with domestic violence, child abuse.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  The share of people who are arrested who have been drinking is shockingly high.

• 9:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Levitt again.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  And even more telling in some sense is that the share of victims of crimes are incredibly likely to be drunk as well. I always wondered whether it was just that everybody is drunk all the time, or really being drunk puts you in situations where you get arrested. But if you watch Cops, as you know I watch Cops, if you watch Cops, it's really interesting.

• 10:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  We should say Cops, the TV show we're talking about.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you watch Cops, the TV show, the next time you watch Cops, the TV show, just try to keep a tally of every person who comes around who's engaged with the police, what share of them do you think have not been using either drugs or alcohol in the last few hours? And it is a really, really low.

• 10:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, although as a selection tool goes, that's not very precise because it could be that all the non-drunk people are too boring for TV.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  It could be, and it's hard to know. But the official data, it is shocking. The level of alcohol abuse among people who get arrested is just amazingly high.

• 10:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's a number to consider. Roughly half of all homicide offenders in the US were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crime. When it comes to domestic violence, roughly 2/3 of the offenders had been drinking. So you might imagine that if society was starting from scratch without alcohol in this fantasy world, we might all say, no way, it's just too dangerous. And what about marijuana?

• 11:22Speaker 03

  I don't think there's any evidence that links use of marijuana to increased violence.

• 11:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Note that Levitt said "use of marijuana," not "selling drugs," which, as we know, can create violence. That said, there was a time when marijuana use was linked to violence.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell. That was the whole Reefer Madness story from 50, 60 years ago, that marijuana use made you a homicidal maniac.

• 11:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jeffrey Myron. He teaches economics at Harvard and is the director of economic policy studies for the Cato Institute.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  I don't think there's much credibility left of that perspective. So, many people are concerned that marijuana is what is known as a gateway drug. That is, once you use marijuana, it makes you more likely to use other drugs. I don't think there's any evidence for it that I would regard as statistically credible. All that one can really document is that many people who use harder drugs did use marijuana before they used harder drugs, but a huge fraction of those who use marijuana never go on to use harder drugs. So the effect, if any, would appear to be quite small. And of course, we can point out that almost everybody who goes on to use marijuana or alcohol, say, started off on mother's milk or McDonald's french fries. So the prior use by itself, we don't think of as causal.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  It's just that there does seem to be an evolution in the pattern for those people who end up going on to use harder drugs.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  Suicide and the ultimate end of the marijuana addict.

• 13:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's David Nutt again, the former UK drug czar.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  When we look at the health dangers of marijuana, we see that there are remarkably little, considering the wide use of the drug. So in the UK, there's almost no deaths attributed to marijuana. And people say, well, how can that be when people are smoking it year on year and year? And the truth is that actually, people don't smoke as much burning material when they smoke marijuana. Also, the marijuana leaf burns at a lower temperature than the tobacco leaf. So in fact, you get less toxic substances into the lungs.

• 13:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  In a 2010 study called Drug Harms in the UK: A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Nutt and a group of colleagues tried to calculate the harm score of 20 different drugs, not only alcohol, marijuana, but heroin, meth, cocaine, LSD, so on. They factored in mortality rate, the cost of dependence, the loss of relationships, injuries, crime, and they also looked at the costs to society in terms of healthcare, police and prison, and lost productivity. So what'd they find? What would you guess was deemed the most harmful drug overall of these 20 drugs?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  It turns out that alcohol was the most harmful drug overall, largely because of the massive harms to society, the huge economic cost, the huge healthcare costs, the huge policing costs of alcohol to society. And cannabis scored at less than half of the overall harms of alcohol.

• 14:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, keep in mind a few caveats. In this kind of calculation, the societal costs of alcohol are huge, in part because alcohol is so readily available. It's legal, it's cheap, and for the most part, society smiles upon it, compared to most of the other drugs on the list, which are illegal, not necessarily so cheap, and generally frowned upon. So while alcohol might have the highest harm score, that may be due in large part to the simple fact of its prevalence.

• 15:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now that said, the evidence is pretty compelling that alcohol is harmful. So, coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what do you do about it? If the world had just discovered alcohol, would you immediately ban it? Well, we've tried that before.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  If something is worth fighting for, people are willing to fight.

• 15:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or, how about a different kind of alcohol? Great taste, less killing.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  You'd have this safe alcohol that you could drink and have fun, but you could also take an antidote that would block its effects. So you would sober up within, you know, half an hour if you took a pill.

• 16:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 17:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting time, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit snhu.edu/freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must haves, like gym access or breakfast, just

• 17:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 18:20Speaker 02

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 18:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so if alcohol and marijuana were both suddenly discovered and we set out to weigh their relative dangers to society, you might conclude that alcohol, at least, is pretty dangerous. So you may think, hey, let's just prohibit it. That'll work, won't it? Here's the economist Jeffrey Myron again.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  So what I was interested in is whether prohibitions of substances like alcohol or drugs are effective in substantially reducing the use of the substance that's prohibited. And the best example we have to look at is alcohol prohibition in the United States, which occurred between 1920 and 1933. Problem, of course, is there are no decent data on alcohol consumption during prohibition because the government that normally collects such data acted as though alcohol consumption wasn't happening. Of course, some of it was happening. The question was exactly how much.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Since Myron couldn't get data that directly spoke to alcohol consumption, he looked for a proxy. It wasn't a perfect proxy, but it was a useful one. Cirrhosis of the liver, which is caused by alcohol abuse.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  And what you find is that alcohol prohibition seems to have had some effect in reducing alcohol use, maybe 10, 20, 30%, but it didn't have an incredibly dramatic effect. When alcohol prohibition was repealed, alcohol use did go up, okay, relative to various other factors one controls for, but again, a moderate amount, say 20, 25%. It's not as though we went from almost no consumption to some huge explosion. There was a modest increase in use.

• 20:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So not only did prohibition not eliminate the use of alcohol, not even close, but it had some rather grim unintended consequences.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  Two thugs who killed two policemen in cold blood met death in this bullet-riddled cab. The cab itself was hit 42 times in the running gunfight. Look at those bullet holes.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Sure, I mean prohibition was a time of amazing violence. The homicide rate in the US in the late 1920s was as high as it's ever been, and you know, two to three times higher than now. And the homicide rate fell dramatically after the end of prohibition. And you know, it makes sense to me that in every setting, when you don't have well-defined property rights and you don't have legal strictures around it, if something is worth fighting for, people are willing to fight. They're willing to take tremendous risks and violence becomes the tool. Now, my own belief is that, I think people will be surprised that within the US, I just don't think there's enough money in illegal marijuana to make people want to do a whole lot of killing.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Now, I understand that in Mexico and other places, there's probably a lot of violence around marijuana. But my hunch is that you won't see really any change at all in drug-related violence in the places where you legalize marijuana, because I don't think that's why people have been killing each other in the first place. I think they've been killing themselves over cocaine and other drugs that are more profitable.

• 21:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt, you've got four kids, oldest is what, 14?

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 21:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you could control all four of your kids in the future and require that they could only consume one or the other, marijuana or alcohol, which would it be?

• 21:49Speaker 03

  I think that I would have them consume alcohol and not marijuana. Because I think alcohol is just such an integral part of being an American. And I think that if you have sensible attitudes towards alcohol, it can be a huge positive and doesn't have to be a huge negative. And I wouldn't maybe give you a different answer.

• 22:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you lived in Holland?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Or in Holland, but especially in 30 years. In 30 years, I'd probably give you a different answer because the role of marijuana in society might change, the role of alcohol might change. And it may be that if, you know, the social role of marijuana becomes very prominent and the hanging out with the wrong kind of people destructive role goes away, that the pure consumption of the marijuana might be better. But the consumption of the alcohol and the consumption of marijuana are such a small part of what the social meaning of it is, that I think it would be crazy to try to raise a bunch of kids who I didn't ever want to touch alcohol and who I encouraged actively to be marijuana smokers.

• 22:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so go beyond then your family and society at large. Does then the social benefit of alcohol outweigh or justify the social costs of alcohol, which strike me as being incredibly high? I mean, no one's looking for a ban here, but as a way of thinking about how we regulate and allow different kinds of activities. I mean, I think all this gets caught up in moral posturing by everybody because alcohol and marijuana both seem to stand for a lot. But if we were talking about just different activities that weren't a controlled substance, I think people would have a different view. Because marijuana, to some people, seems pretty benign.

• 23:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And alcohol, to those same people, seems potentially to have a lot of costs spread across society.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  I've never done a calculation, but my hunch is that the benefits of alcohol are huge relative to the cost of alcohol.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  If you're willing to count the utility that people get from using and abusing alcohol as part of your calculus, I think it's not even close. I think that the joy and the pleasure that people get from alcohol, as evidenced by the amount that we drink and how central it is to everything we do, is just, you know, orders of magnitude bigger than the costs. I think marijuana, that's probably true too, we just don't have as much information. But I doubt ever we're going to get to a place where if we had a vote and we said, "You can only have one, alcohol or marijuana," that marijuana would ever win. Because I think alcohol, somehow, for whatever reason of how we've evolved, the brain loves alcohol in a way that I'm not sure the brain loves marijuana.

• 24:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, we may find out just how much the brain loves marijuana as it's decriminalized in more places. We asked Jeffrey Myron what might happen as marijuana becomes more available and if, say, some people substituted marijuana for alcohol.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  So several studies have looked at the following combination of effects. If marijuana becomes legal and therefore more accessible and cheaper, and some people at least substitute from alcohol to marijuana, and if, as appears to be true, the negative effects on driving ability from marijuana are smaller, in no way zero, but certainly smaller than those from alcohol, then we should actually see fewer traffic fatalities because some of the people who will be driving under the influence would be driving under the influence of marijuana, which seems to be less bad, and therefore we might see fatalities go down. And indeed, three or four studies over the past 20 years have found exactly that result.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  So there is this potentially beneficial externality from legalizing marijuana in inducing the substitution, which reduces traffic accidents.

• 25:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  But as Steve Levitt notes, we know that people love alcohol, side effects and all. So wouldn't it be great if somehow we could have all the benefits without the costs? Remember David Nutt, the British psychiatrist who was fired for claiming that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana? He has some ideas about that.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Most of my professional career, I have been trying to find ways of treating alcoholism and helping people deal with the problems of alcohol dependence and alcohol withdrawal, and trying to find an antidote to alcohol. And I realize now that's impossible. And it's occurred to me a while back that maybe we were asking the wrong question. Rather than try to solve the problem of alcohol, why don't we find an alternative to alcohol which doesn't cause problems? Find a safe alternative, a drug which makes you pleasantly intoxicated, but which does not cause addiction, doesn't rot your brain, your liver, your guts, et cetera. And when you think about that, the way to do it would be to find a substance where you had an antidote, so you could go to a party, have fun, and then take the antidote and drive home safely.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And you could imagine if that were available and everyone used it, you'd save 3 million deaths a year, which is more than malaria, tuberculosis, and meningitis put together. Wouldn't that be a good thing? And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to bring a rational approach to dealing with the problems of alcohol by getting rid of it and replacing it with a safe alternative.

• 27:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is something that David Nutt is actually working on, a synthetic alcohol designed to mimic the effects of alcohol on the brain while minimizing all the downsides: hangovers, liver damage, loss of coordination. Now, in conjunction with this synthetic alcohol, Nutt and his colleagues have also been working on an alcohol antidote, sort of a sober pill.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  So the idea would be that you'd have this safe alcohol that you could drink and have fun, but you could also take an antidote that would block its effects. So you would sober up within, you know, half an hour if you took a pill. And that would mean that you could then perfectly, absolutely normal, and you could drive home quite safely.

• 27:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now that, you'd have to admit, would be a real fantasy world.

• 28:10Speaker 08

  Boys are mellows, a honeydew. Yeah. That cat is high. Look that look in his eye. Oh, man, he's high. Yes, higher than a kite.

• 28:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. On next week's episode, if your fitness routine is typical, that means it's probably nonexistent.

• 28:34Speaker 09

  Most Americans are not exercising. The best statistics suggest that at least 80% of Americans are not meeting the most commonly used guidelines for exercise.

• 28:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how do you become part of that elite 20%? Is there some secret exercise routine that'll definitely keep you off your butt? Yes, there is.

• 28:56Speaker 09

  Whatever you will do is certainly the best exercise.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Well, what do you actually like doing? Do something that you actually enjoy. Do something that makes you better.

• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  How to exercise and not hate it. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with engineering help from Jim Briggs. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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