Stuff You Should Know - Marijuana Vs. Alcohol: Which Is Worse For You?

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

It's been the subject of teenage conversation for decades already, but now you can join Josh and Chuck as they dive into the science of how pot and booze affect your body, mind and behavior and learn which one comes out on top. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we are going back on the road for 2018, and we are super excited because we're gonna be doing brand new material, which we are certainly glad for. And if you live in Odenver, or Cleveland, or St. Louis, or Boston, or Washington DC, then you can come see us.

Yes, you can come see us. Specifically, if you're in Boston, we're gonna be at the Wilbur Theater on April 4th, and then the next night on April 5th, we're gonna be in DC at the beloved Lincoln Theater. We love those two places, don't we Chuck? We sure do. And then on the 22nd of May,

we're gonna be in St. Louis, Missouri for the first time ever at the pageant. And then another first for us is the next night, May 23rd, we're gonna be in Cleveland, Ohio at the Ohio Theater, dude. I'm very excited about both Cleveland and St. Louis because we wanted to add some new shows. We get a lot of support in Ohio that we know for sure,

and got family there, and I just can't wait. But wait, wait, there's more. We're going back to the Gothic Theater in Englewood, Colorado, aka right outside Denver. We're gonna be there June 28th, and it's going to be nuts. We're gonna have a great time at all these. So, we want you to come see us. You can go to thewillbur.com.

You can go to Ticketfly for the DC show. You can go to Ticketmaster for the St. Louis show. Search us on playhousesquare.org for the Ohio Theater Cleveland show. And then lastly, axs.com to search for us at the Gothic Theater, and we will see you guys very soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from howstuffworks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Roland, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Because you put the three of us together, roll us up in a paper, add a match to the mix. You've got one great podcast. Or throw us all in a snifter. Okay.

Swirl us around. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we're in aperteef. That's nice. And why not just, why decide? Why choose one over the other, right? Because then we would kill each other in a car. Yeah, we would.

Well, let's start legitimately here, Chuck. First of all, how are you? Great. Good, okay, I am too. But let's start even more legitimately than that. Let's get in the way back machine, okay? I live in this thing. Emily kicked me out, so I've been living

in the way back machine for a few weeks now. With your dog. Just one of them though, she only gave me one of the dogs. It's kind of gave me in here, you know. It is. Okay, well, we're in Chuck's repurposed way back machine. And we're just going just for a second, Chuck.

We're going back to 2014. Right. And we're going to go to New York City and we're going to buy a New Yorker magazine. Okay, and now we can go back to 2018. Okay, and we're going to flip open this New Yorker magazine. Oh, look, Chuck, it's an interview

with then President Barack Obama. Do you remember him? I do. So in 2014, Obama gave this interview to New Yorker and he really kind of created a bit of a stir. I mean, since he first ran in 2008, everybody knew he smoked pot or pictures of it. Like he never denied it.

He admitted to smoking pot. But this interview in 2014 really just changed things because in it, Obama said that he did not believe that his pot smoking was anything really worse than his bad cigarette habit. And that he doesn't think, he didn't think that it was more dangerous than alcohol. Right.

He's really saying something because I mean, like, you know, as teenagers have been saying for decades and decades now, it's crazy that something like alcohol can be bought like at any corner store, at drug stores in some states. Yeah, grocery stores. And that like you can drink it as long as you're 21 and get in your car and drive up to a certain limit, but pot is totally illegal in most states still.

And Obama was saying kind of throwing down the gauntlet saying, you know, in a very roundabout way, he was saying, I don't know that that's necessarily right. That pot should be illegal and you should be able to buy alcohol anywhere because pot's not as bad as booze. Yeah, which was, man, times have really changed in our, you know, in the past like 20 years

because I remember when Clinton, it was such a scandal that he had inhaled and- No, he didn't inhale, remember? Well, the thing came out and he said, well, I tried to and I couldn't and the whole- He's such a, just a liar, man. Well, who knows, that may have been true. I just think my reaction was, oh, well,

that just means you're super lame. You don't know what you're doing, Bill. But it was just such a scandal. And then, I mean, here we are now where, you know, state after state is legalizing recreational marijuana. Yeah. Which is really interesting to see that change happen. Not even like medicinal marijuana anymore.

That was like the gateway legislation. Now it's like straight up, you want a smoke pot to get high just for fun, you can do that in, let's see, Chuck. So it started with Washington and Colorado, right? I think, were they the first two? They were, back in 2014. And just since 2014, you've now got Oregon, California,

Vermont, Washington, D.C., Nevada, Massachusetts, Maine, Alaska, and Washington State. Well, Washington State was the first, right? Yeah. It was the state so nice, I said it twice. Or maybe they just super, like when you reaffirm your wedding vows, maybe they doubled down a few years later and said, this is so great.

We just want to like legalize it again. I think they did do that in Washington. We were there recently for live shows and I can tell you, they definitely renewed their vows with pot. Yeah, we were in San Francisco, we're gonna be in Colorado and then Washington and Oregon. So, and we're going to Massachusetts.

I guess we just need to hit Nevada and we're going to D.C. Yeah. Nevada, Maine, and Alaska and it will be the stuff you should know up in Smoke Tour. We need t-shirts for that one. Not that we would ever do that. No, no, but we could still make t-shirts that suggest it. Yeah, and my funny joke on stage in San Francisco,

we were there literally the weekend that the first recreational pot shops opened and the joke was San Francisco day after exactly like San Francisco was the day before. Yeah. No change. It killed. It was all right.

They loved it. So, the upshot of all of this is that with all these states like legalizing marijuana, the comparison between pot and alcohol has kind of become less of like a stoner conversation. Like it's actually a legitimate academic discussion nowadays. It has to be. There's a lot of different things that come into play

before it was kind of like, well, ultimately it doesn't matter because Uncle Sam, well actually Tricky Dick says that it's illegal. So, it's illegal so it doesn't really matter if it's worse for you or not. It's way worse to be put into jail than it is to be tipsy off of alcohol and maybe risk cirrhosis of the liver, right?

Yes. So, that ended all conversations there but as that conversation ender has kind of fallen away, the conversations kind of opened up. So, I guess what we're doing here today is doing the best we can at putting the conversation to rest even though now that we've dived into it, we've seen that the conversation is very far

from being put to rest. Yeah, and this one's gonna, there are a lot of stats. It's very stat heavy episode which is fun but the first thing we should point out is that in terms of marijuana because it was illegal, there hasn't been a lot of funding thrown at studies over the years because like you said, it's like why bother it's illegal?

We're not gonna put our resources towards studying it. Now they kind of have to but the long and short of it is we are still and will be for many years gathering data on what pot does to the body, how dangerous it is but early results clearly indicate at least in the short term and we're gonna run the gamut here but in the short term, you can start a night out having fun drinking

and end up dead hours later just from the alcohol. Yeah. I'm not saying by getting in a car or jumping off a building. Like all those things can happen too but you can drink yourself to death in hours. Yeah, so the CDC put out like a very famous statistic now that said that every year in the United States

about 88,000 people die from alcohol every year and that's all alcohol related deaths like liver disease, car crashes, all that but about half of those are from binge drinking which is drinking usually for men about five or more drinks and for women, I think it's like three or more drinks within two hours or something like that and then going on and once you start to get to that point,

you start to run an increasing risk of alcohol poisoning. Yeah, I mean, your body cannot process alcohol fast enough. Like you can drink past that amount. Like I said, such that, I mean, you hear sad stories about the kid in college who literally died from drinking one night. Yep. That cannot be said of marijuana.

Well, it depends. Well, it doesn't depend. No, it does. I think it's literally impossible to consume as much marijuana as you would have to consume over a period of hours to die from it. Okay, yes, yes, absolutely. You're right, you're right.

It doesn't depend. That's true, like, and there's a lot of people who point to that statistic where they basically say 88,000 people die a year from alcohol, zero people die a year from marijuana. That's not necessarily true. But if you're talking about overdosing, yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Like people don't overdose and die from marijuana. And many have tried. Sure, especially Cheech and Chong. But the amount of THC you would have to ingest is so much more than you could possibly take under normal circumstances that you're just not going to. So like... Yeah, what are the numbers here?

To figure this out, well, you're Statman. I just want to set up that we used high times as a source for this episode. Cause we're like, okay, so how much THC is in pot and how much does that break down to depending on whether you smoke a bowl or smoke a joint or eat an edible. And we said, well, who would know more than anyone else?

And it turns out it's high times. Yeah, so here's the thing with pot too. It really varies according to who you are, how much you typically ingest, how strong the pot is. But are we going to go with these numbers here? 18% THC. Which I think is fairly average these days, which is super high, but that's normal.

That's a normal amount in pot, I think. That's about 180 milligrams per gram of marijuana. Right. And if people don't know, THC is the active ingredient that gets you high in the marijuana plant. Yeah, what is a Delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol? Oh, you just read the tattoo on your forearm. Yeah, it's misspelled as you can see.

I was wondering what that was. Here's the thing though, you lose THC when it's burned, about 60%. And trust me, marijuana users have tried to lower that number as much as possible for the average. And to some success, supposedly with the vaporizer, you lose a lot less because you're not actually burning the THC, right?

Yeah, I mean, there are all manner of ways to ingest marijuana now. Partially because of, I mean, there are always were, but partially because of this recreational, and I always wondered what that would look like if it was legalized because, you know, I've been to Amsterdam and stuff, and I thought, well, is it gonna be like that

where you have marijuana in jars and like a, they call them bud tenders, which is so stupid. That is stupid. Or I thought, well, now it's America, I bet you anything is gonna be like a cigarette pack that's highly manufactured, but just joints. And it turns out it's sort of not either.

I mean, it's very on the up and up, like I've been into one of those stores just to look around and it's like visiting any coffee or tea shop, you know, it's all very, it's not just dudes with a bag that they throw into another bag, you know? They pull it out of their sock. I guess so. I guess it's my way of saying it's,

the recreational pot shops that I've seen have been very professional and everything is very packaged and it's just like any other commodity. So did you walk in and go, are you the bud tender? I'm from Hot Lana. I'm doing a story for a podcast. So, okay, so depending on how you ingest the pot, especially whether you're burning it or not,

you're gonna lose some THC, but if you burn it, you lose about 60%. So if you have a 180 milligram per gram THC, it's suddenly down to what, 72 milligrams per gram. And if you're smoking a half a gram joint, let's say you're even smoking a one gram joint, and you're getting 72 milligrams of THC from that joint, you're still immensely shy on the level

of orders of magnitude different of how much it would take to overdose on THC. Yeah, I mean, I think the number in here is a minimum of like 150 joints. You would have to smoke by yourself over a very short period of time. Yeah, because so you're getting 72 milligrams in that joint of THC,

but it would take something like at least 15 grams of THC to overdose. So yes, you would have to smoke hundreds of joints in basically a day to start to build up enough THC in your bloodstream that you overdosed fatally. I'm trying to picture the study, like being behind the one way glass and the guy being like, how many is this?

And they're like 110 and he's like, I can't do it anymore. Like that's why you would not overdose. There's just no way. Yeah, for sure. I would imagine you'd fall asleep or get bored or forget what you were doing or whatever. I think it'd be more likely that you would have to eat like a triple layer cake made entirely of marijuana.

So I'm glad you said that because that definitely edibles are different and they're different in a couple of ways. One way they're different is that they don't burn. You're not burning the THC. So you're not necessarily losing a bunch of it. Right. You also can eat more of it

than say you're smoking as far as THC is concerned. So you can definitely increase like how much how much THC you're getting by eating it rather than smoking it. But the other thing about edibles is that you actually, your body does something differently with them. And that is that when you're smoking marijuana, you're introducing THC in its normal form

from your lungs to your heart to your brain. THC can cross that blood brain barrier, but it's not the greatest that. It's kind of hit or miss, right? When you ingest THC where you eat it like an edible, it goes through your digestive system and that THC is metabolized. It's broken down by the liver

and then sent into the bloodstream. Well, what the metabolized version does is it's much better at crossing the blood brain barrier. So you get a much more powerful high from eating an edible and you get a higher dose of THC even though it's this THC metabolite. So eating edibles is different and it is possible that it would bring you closer.

It's statistically speaking, increase your risk of coming near a fatal dose of THC. But again, still like that, the amount you would have to eat is ridiculously high. Yeah, and I think most of the cases of, since recreational has been introduced of, oh my God, I have to go to the emergency room, have been people that ate too much pot.

Yeah, and also one of the other big problems with edibles, well, there's two of them. One is that people eat too much because it takes like hours to kick in. Right, and they're like, oh, I'm not feeling anything. Let me have four more. Yeah, which is a real problem with those things. And then secondly also,

kids tend to get into edibles more than they find your pot and roll a joint, which is dangerous because they have lower body mass and I would, I mean, their fatal dose or whatever could cause them health problems is much, it's a much lower threshold for a small kid. Yeah, for sure, which is scary. Yeah, well, yeah, sure.

All right, well, so we've covered the OD aspect. Well, do you want to take a break? All right, let's take a break. Let's try to decide. Let's take a break. We'll come right back after this. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we covered the OD thing, like I said, before the break. I feel like that's settled now. It's settled law. So here's the other thing with alcohol

is that the way it reacts and interacts with other drugs is significantly more different than marijuana. Most people know this, but that's why they, on your prescription bottles, they say things like, don't drink when you take this. Because depending on what the drug is, whether it's painkillers or meds for your mental well-being, you can either end up having a higher dose of that

or a lower dose, depending on what it is, how much you've had to drink. And that's always scary because we've seen all over the place people accidentally overdosing by combining prescription drugs and alcohol. Yeah, and I mean, if you get a lower dose and it's medicine, you really need. That's bad too, sure.

Yeah, it's just as bad. And it's because alcohol is either exciting all of the enzymes in your liver, and they metabolize the medicine faster than it's designed to be. So you get a big dose. Or they hog all of the enzymes, and the medicine just kind of passes through your liver unmetabolized, and you don't get the dose you're looking for.

Either way, it's not good for you. Yeah, and like this article that you put together points out, though, we should mention that marijuana, though, can impair your coordination. So there is a risk of just literally getting hurt because you're uncoordinated. You may trip over your coffee table and fall into your couch or your papa's on.

Or your lava lamp. You don't want to go ahead first and do a lava lamp. No. That's bad. I know we're making light, but seriously, that is a risk. Or just your unprotected sex because your inhibitions are lowered, although what Sam can be said for alcohol. Yes, that's absolutely true.

And I think this article does say it's just in a different spot. But yeah, your judgment can be impaired, too, which can lead to all manner of indirect effects, which might seem like, oh, that doesn't count. But actually, they very much do count because you wouldn't have otherwise made those decisions if you hadn't been drunk or stoned. So they count, for sure.

So those are some of the short-term health effects from drinking, death. But there's long-term ones, too, that come on. And this is where the lack of literature studying pot really comes into play. Because we've been studying alcohol, and the effects of alcohol for so long now, we have it pretty well licked that alcohol is really, really

bad for you if you drink heavily. But strangely, kind of good for you if you drink in moderate amounts. With pot, we just don't know. There hasn't been enough study. And part of the problem, like you were saying, is it was illegal. And since it was illegal, it was kind of difficult to get your hands on study participants

because they didn't want to tell you that they smoked pot and maybe have that go on any kind of permanent record or something. Yeah, I mean, for alcohol, the obvious physical effects, it's tough on your liver. And alcoholic liver disease is a real thing that can progress from early stages, fibrosis, to eventual liver cancer.

And they don't really know exactly the mechanism for why some people can drink heavily well into their old age and not have any liver damage, or maybe some liver damage, but not die of liver cancer. And then other people are at much higher risk. They don't fully get that. I mean, it's just got to be genetics, right? Any time that comes up and they're like, well,

we have no idea why these people are subject to it and other people aren't, it's always, it's got to be genetics. Yeah, like why is Keith Richards alive? No, medical science will never explain that. He should totally donate his body to science. Yeah, oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, he really should, actually.

It's like a legitimate, jokey thing to say, but it's true. So you've got alcohol messing with your liver. With pot, they're kind of like, OK, well, if you're a chronic pot user, what's the problem? Chronic pot user? Yeah, chronic pot user. Chronic pot user. I think that's the way you would say it.

So with a chronic pot user, and it's defined differently, which I think is another thing that kind of makes the literature on the topic kind of difficult to study, too, is people, I don't think there's a universal, this is what a chronic pot user is. I think each study defines it for itself. But for a long time, there was some literature that said that smoking pot lowers your sperm count.

But almost all of those were from the 70s and 80s, and all of these studies referred to pot as grass. So no one took them seriously at all, right? But in 2015, there was a Danish study that really kind of updated the literature, and they found that there was a 28% decrease in sperm count among chronic pot smokers. And they define chronic pot smokers as men who smoked

more than one joint a week, which is, there's a lot of people who smoke pot smoke more than one joint a week. Okay. Okay, so they have found a decrease in sperm production. That's definitely a thing. All right, well, there's the psychological and mental health issues at stake, too.

And again, not as much literature as we need. Like this show 10 years from now would be very different, I think. I think, well, we should revisit it 10 years from now. Totally agree. So, yeah, even if we retire in five years, we'll come back 10 years from now to do the marijuana one-off special.

There you go. It's like getting friends back together. That'd be cool. I get to be Rachel. Oh, you're always Rachel. I know. I've got the haircut. So it's funny, the Omnibus podcast

did an entire episode on the Rachel. I saw that. So with mental health issues, for a long time, they weren't really sure whether teenagers who had mental health issues smoked pot to deal with it or maybe something like bipolar doesn't really come on until your mid-teens anyway, maybe pot could trigger that or depression

or something if it is laying dormant inside of you. But recently, they've done a little more studying and they do think that it can, in your earlier years, exacerbate these mental health disorders if you are predisposed. Right, that's kind of a significant finding too, although it makes sense intuitively because when you are a teenager,

your brain is still developing and pot has been shown to change your cognitive development. So it would make sense that if there's a biological basis for some mental health issues, like depression or bipolar or schizophrenia, that it would stand a reason that pot could have some effect on that. And they finally have said, yes,

we generally can see that pot probably makes mental health or predisposition and mental health issues worse in adolescence, which is sad and it's significant too, because at least in the US, pot use peaks among kids who are age 18 and then it starts to taper off or it tapers off fully by the mid-20s in most people.

Yeah, so the majority of people who smoke pot in the US are teenagers anyway, but these studies are starting to show that the last people who should be smoking pot are teenagers because it can affect their brain development. Make them less than sharp. Yeah, I wonder about those numbers. Those seem dubious to me.

The 18, peak at 18 and taper off in mid-20s, yeah. And I'm not just thinking of Willie Nelson here. He's skewing the results. He does skew the results, for sure. You have to weight him differently because he smokes a lot of pot. That's what I hear. With pot, obviously,

although things are a little bit different these days with, like you said, vaporizing and edibles and stuff like that, but in the olden days when everybody just smoked it, bronchitis obviously in just various lung air passage issues is sort of an obvious risk. Although they are now thinking that the newest data says that marijuana smoke doesn't affect the body

like tobacco smoke does. And they have no idea why. No. This just doesn't make sense to them. And they're like, well, they've started to wonder if pot has some sort of protective chemical in it. It just kind of gives the lungs a glass of milk

and tucks them in after it's done being passed through there. Well, yeah. And it's also tough because to do studies, like a lot of times people may also smoke cigarettes. We smoke marijuana regularly. And again, with the illegality, it's just kind of tough to get good data on this. Yep.

And then Chuck, pregnancy is another thing. You can kind of put pot and alcohol head to head with pregnancy. And apparently neither one is particularly good. Although the studies are much clearer on alcohol being bad for pregnant women to drink than pot smoking. But there's again, from the CDC, there's a pretty famous statistic

that 3.3 million women are at risk in the US of exposing their baby to alcohol. And what they're saying, the point is, is that even if you drink just in the first few weeks of being pregnant, it can lead to what's called fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Like cognitive, behavioral, physical, development disorders from drinking alcohol

while you're pregnant, even in the first few weeks. And so that 3.3 million women number, that's like binders full of women. It basically says that is the number of women in the US. The CDC estimates have stopped using birth control but haven't stopped drinking. So those two things could conceivably cross over for a couple of weeks and which could lead

to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. And they're saying like, despite what you hear that a glass of wine isn't bad for you or every once in awhile or something while you're pregnant, apparently the literature combined says, there's really no safe level of alcohol to drink while you're pregnant. Well, here's the deal, is they don't fully know.

Like I did some digging, cause I know outside of the United States there's generally a more relaxed attitude, at least in some countries. It says here that, and this is from an NPR article, a 2015 study found that alcohol consumption ranged from 20% to 80% in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. Sometimes it was just like a glass of champagne

at a special event. Sometimes it was a glass of wine once a night or once a week in the third trimester. Sometimes it was 20 cc's of golden grain injected into their neck. So this one group did, Luisa Zuccolo, she's a health epidemiologist at Bristol, did a study recently and she found that consuming

up to 32 grams of alcohol per week, this two to three drinks was associated with a 10% increased risk of preterm birth only. But here's the deal, is in America, they basically say, listen, we don't know for sure the threshold of exactly when and how and at what point in the pregnancy these effects can occur, but we do know this, if you don't drink,

you have a 100% chance of not having a risk of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. And why don't we all just err on the side of caution and wait for that nine months. But that's like a ticklish situation for us dudes to be in, Chuck, because you know, that's a real drag. Just be like, just don't drink for nine months. I'm gonna go have a beer, but you don't drink, okay?

Sure, some husbands quit drinking as a show of support or cut back. I think that is definitely what should be done. Yeah, I mean, I think people should do it. It works best for them, but. Sure, but if your wife or your SO is not going to drink while she's pregnant, then you should not either. I hear your take on that.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure. I'll say it again at the end. I'll circle back up. My take is people should do it works best for them as a couple. Right. And I will also say this, when you adopt a kid, neither one of you have to stop drinking.

Right, problem solved. Just throwing that out there. Yeah. With marijuana during pregnancy, they don't know for sure exactly how that can affect cognitive impairment, but they do think that they have found some cognitive impairment results from fetal exposure.

Right. But again, they don't have like thresholds. I mean, I've heard some doctors say we would rather a mother smoke a little pot if she has a lot of anxiety or potentially depression during her pregnancy than hopping on pills or having a drink. But again, that's not like some official doctor recommendation.

It's very anecdotal. It's like an anonymous comment from a doctor who will go unnamed. Exactly. So I also saw that some studies have found that they have linked low birth weight to marijuana use in pregnancy too. Right.

So yeah, the upshot is, what did you say? The couples should do what they think is best. Well, I mean, that's my role. Your rule is everyone follow my role. Yeah, right. So there's also a big distinction between pot and drinking, Chuck, when it comes to crime too, like a big one.

This is probably the clearest line of all. And kind of funny. Yeah. Well, not funny, but the predicted result is a little amusing to me because they did find in 2014 that the average marijuana user as far as partner violence intimate partner violence goes is actually lower overall than people who don't even drink or do drink.

It's lower than everybody. Right, right. So like if you were just the normie and normal who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, you're like a Ned Flanders type. Statistically speaking, in the first nine years of marriage, you're more likely to commit violence against your partner than a person who smokes pot regularly.

It's hilarious. It is funny. Like you gotta look at it in a certain light and just kind of divorce yourself from the partner violence thing. Yeah, I mean, nothing about that is funny. I just picture like the stone person on the couch being like, well, no, of course,

I'm not gonna get mad and hit you. Right, well, I forgot what I ought to do. Yeah. So on the other end of the spectrum, alcohol is linked to a surprising and alarming amount of crime. Yes. The Department of Justice says that alcohol is a factor

in 40% of the violent crime in the United States. And there was a survey of two million convicted offenders who were currently in jail at the time of the survey. 37% said they were drinking at the time they committed their crime. Yeah, I bet for partner violence too, that's, I bet it's way higher even. It is, that was the highest one was men drinking,

but also women drinking too and they had a higher, those are, I believe, were the two highest incidences of intimate partner violence in the first nine years of marriage. If the show cops can anecdotally tell a tale, is that 100% of the home visits where the husband and wife are both bombed and pushing each other around is,

that's kind of like every episode of cops, basically. It's definitely got that one. I still watch that show every now and then Emily gets so upset at me. It's on all the time still. I know. It's like golden girls. Sometimes I'll catch a little bit of one

and just remember like, oh, I used to watch this in college and think it was a hoot. And then part of me is like so depressing, so depressing watching it that I can't even watch for five minutes. Man, I was, I tweeted the other day that I used to think humanity was on the whole, like generally decent and good.

And then I started watching a lot of forensic files. Yeah, I should watch that. I don't think you should, man. It really will kind of change the way you look at people, that people do some really bad stuff. Yeah, it's really depressing. You just kind of lose a measure of faith in humanity because the way that the show presents it too

is so like, matter of fact, this happened and this person picked up a rock and beat their friend over the head and then took their $5. Yeah. And it was stuff like that. You want to take a break? Yeah.

Really to reset, I think. Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk about driving while intoxicated right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

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All right, we're back. Here's the deal with driving drunken stone. For sure, you shouldn't be doing either. We're not endorsing either one. But the statistics and studies roundly say that when you're drinking, you are way more likely to be like, oh, I can take this curve. It's 80.

Oh, I'm fine to drive. And people that are stoned that are like, I need to be super careful because I'm a little high right now. And I'm going to be extra careful and drive even slower than I should. Yeah, like that is what the studies show. Yeah, and the differences are so pronounced

that you can look at fatal accident statistics and see that in some areas, the legalization of pot has actually brought the number of traffic deaths down in those states. And they think that the reason why is because people are drinking less and smoking pot more and that when you smoke pot, you are something of a, you're not a safer driver necessarily.

Although some studies show that you actually are safer than people who aren't impaired. That's pretty rare. But you're a safer impaired driver for sure. But I think you said something very, very true. You shouldn't be driving stoned or drunk. Because you're taking your own life in your hands. You're also taking the lives of everybody else

out on the road on your hands and shame on you for that. Yeah, but I found it very interesting that some of these studies like roundly say that a person stoned is way more likely to say, hey, you know what, I'm stoned and I need to be super careful. And a person drinking will say, I'm fine. Give me the keys.

I'm fine. Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. So like there's two different ways that being impaired and driving affect you, whether you're stoned and whether you're drunk. Yes. And what tends to happen is if you're drunk and you're driving, you typically

act more impulsively, more aggressively, more recklessly, which are three things that really go poorly with driving. Yes. So you're going to tailgate more. You're going to pass people more. You're going to speed more. You're going to just be an aggressive driver, but also one whose reaction times are not as good as they

are normally, right? Right. When you're stoned, however, the general idea among scientists who are just beginning to study the stuff over the last few years is that you tend to overestimate how impaired you are. Where you've smoked some pot, you feel stoned, now you've gotten behind the wheel of car,

and you're a little freaked out, to be frank. You are worried that you're going to get pulled over, that you're going to cause a wreck. And so you're actually overcompensating for your impairment, because you're overestimating the amount of impairment you have. And so you're going to drive slower, like much slower sometimes.

Yeah, the one doing the article said that the joke is Cheech and Chong driving 20 on the expressway. Yeah, there's a study that just is hilarious to me, that in driving simulators, these people who are conducting the study had to remind the stone drivers to keep up to the speed limit. They kept dropping below the speed limit. They also tend to give more distance between the next car

and their car, even when compared to non-impaired drivers. Yeah, and the one thing that I found remarkable was that when they did the simulated experiments, people under the influence of marijuana performed worse than they did in the real driving experiment. So in other words, in the room with a simulator, they might have goofed up some. But when they actually got behind the wheel,

they again turned on some switch that was like, all right, gotta be super careful. Right. So interesting. Yeah, and even more to the point, if you take the individual things that driving requires, like coordination, paying attention, reaction time, if you test those things individually

outside of the context of driving, people who smoke pot routinely do worse on those things. But again, yeah, when they get behind the wheel, it's like, it's serious time for people who smoke pot. So this thing about that though, is that the studies find that that's true up to a certain point. Yeah.

That when you pass a certain level of impairment, then all of a sudden your chances of being responsible for a fatal accident go up dramatically. Yeah. And what they found is that that point correlates possibly to a THC content in your blood of about five parts per billion or five nanograms per liter. Yes.

Which is very, it's a very controversial number. It's a controversial amount. Well, and it's, at this point, like a breathalyzer, we did a show on breathalyzers. It was, boy, that was a tough one. Yeah, remember how complicated those things are? Yeah, that was very technical and tough, but. There's like a magical crystal involved in them.

But with a breathalyzer, like you can tell when someone is literally drunk at that moment. With marijuana, you're doing blood and urine test that shows that you have marijuana in your system. If you are a heavy marijuana user, you could be stone cold sober and show marijuana in your system. Yeah.

So they don't really have a foolproof way of testing, like pulling someone off the street, from behind the wheel of a car and seeing if they were stoned at that moment. So, and that's one of the reasons why some states are starting to adopt that five parts per billion threshold, because apparently studies find that

if you're a regular smoker, and you've got a bunch of THC in your body that's accumulated, but you haven't smoked recently, you're not gonna be over five parts per billion. That's the thinking, yeah. Okay, and then the other one is that statistic that says that your chances of being in a fatal crash increase dramatically over five parts per billion.

So that's why some states are adopting it. But some other studies, especially ones out of Europe, are like, whoa, that is way too high a limit. It should be more like one part per billion. Yeah, I think they're trying to land on the right number. They definitely are. I think Sweden is adopting a one part per billion limit. And they're apparently famous for being really strict

about impaired driving. So they kind of set the trend on the one end of the spectrum, whereas the US kind of edges toward the other end of the spectrum. Like with blood alcohol content, I think the legal limit in most states is 0.08%, which is about, I think for like 180 pound man, that's like three or four drinks in an hour.

And I mean, three or four drinks in an hour and getting behind a car, that is a lot. You're not driving very well. It's like an arbitrarily high number if you really think about it. Part of the other problem too with testing for whether somebody's impaired by pot or reached some limit or threshold

is that there's no real reliable way for testing it on the side of the road, including that roadside field sobriety test. They make you stand on one foot. They make you walk, heal the toe, and then turn around. And I think there's a third part to it too. And that's actually really good at catching drunk people. It catches like 88% of people who are drunk at the time,

but it only catches like 30% of people who are stoned. So the cops are starting to come up against this, these new laws where you're allowed to smoke pot, but how much is too much to get behind the wheel of a car and there's no real guidance and they don't really have any way of testing. And again, like you said, in 10 years, all of this will be resolved.

But for the time being, it's kind of like the Wild West as far as driving while impaired by pot legislation is concerned. Yeah, I got pulled over coming home from college to Atlanta one time. Only time I've ever had like a field sobriety test done on me. And he flat out asked me, he's like, Mr. Bryant, have you been smoking marijuana

after you put me through it? Because he did the thing where you follow the finger with your eyeballs. Yeah, that's the third part. And I think it's supposed, I'm not sure what's supposed to happen. Like your eyeball twitches or something once it reaches the edge.

I think it bounces up and down while it's going left to right. Okay, I'm not sure. All I know is he told me, you know, keep your head forward and follow it with your eyes. And I turned my head and followed his finger. And I was just, I was nothing. I was sober as a judge and I was just nervous

because I'd never been pulled over on the side of the road and told the walk of line. And he finally just asked me, I was like, no, like 19, I was just scared. And eventually he was like, all right, get in your VW Beetle and drive home. Did you, did you take the tack of crying to get out of the ticket?

No, I cried on the inside. Okay. Which, you know, I don't think he noticed. It's just interesting. I've never, you know, that's the only time in my life I've ever been pulled over and given that test. And it was, even if you're sober, it's a little nerve wracking.

Sure, yeah. Well, it's like that white coat syndrome where your blood pressure goes up at the doctor's office because you're anxious for being at the doctor's office. I know, I remember going like in my brain, heel-toe, heel-toe. Right. I was like, wait a minute, this, this is no problem.

Yeah. My balance is never a good officer. One if that ever works. Or, uh, Ossifer. Yeah. It's always fun to throw that in, but be totally sober. Right. Just go ahead and sit in the back of that police car

after that one. So you got anything else? No, I mean, we should point out that, you know, another factor with drinking and driving is, you know, you drink at a bar a lot of times, whereas they think predominantly, if you're smoking pot, you're probably in your home. So you're not driving.

There are all sorts of other factors that, that go into these big, big statistical studies, but we're, we're just at the, the eve. We're mere babies as a country when it comes to marijuana legislation and study. Yeah. Me interested to see where it goes. I'll see you in 10 years.

Yeah, I'll see you in 10, man. Okay. Well, in the meantime, you can look up, well, there's not this article on how stuff works. You can just look up pop versus alcohol and it'll bring up a lot of great stuff. We worked off of some stuff from popular science, from slate, from, actually,

there's a how stuff works article now that I think about it. High times. Live science, high times, some good resources out there. Just hit them up. WillieNelson.com. Yeah. And in the meantime, since Chuck said Willie Nelson, it's time for Listener Mail.

This is overlap of podcasts. I don't think I've read this one yet. Okay. Hey guys, my name is Neil. I enjoy listening to stuff you should know and stuff you missed in history class. And roller skating and long walks on the beach. Sometimes I've heard the same subject get daylight

on both of your programs though. Very recently, you guys did a Mary Celeste episode. And if I recall, Holly and Tracy did the same story not too long ago. Josh mentioned to Chuck about the woman who painted miniature crime scenes and so did they. My question is whether or not we ever swap notes on subjects across reference each other's work

where there might be overlap, it could be nice. Even set up different situations where each podcast looks at the same subject at a different angle. Anyway, it might be a good thing to introduce to the other podcasts to someone who's not listening to it. Keep up the good work. That is from Neil in Washington DC. And Neil, I think we've answered this years ago,

but we, well, I was about to say we try not to overlap, but no one really pays much attention internally in it. It just happens sometimes. And the only time it's ever been like, ah, shoot, is when it's literally within like a few weeks of each other. Then we might've wished we would've timed it differently, but we always feel like all the different shows bring different things to the table.

And so it's really not a big deal, but we definitely don't check with each other or share notes or anything. We're all in our own little bubbles. Yeah, but also, I mean, if we are aware that one of the other podcasts has already done something, like that doesn't preclude us from doing it ourselves. And we would probably mention it if we were aware of it,

like go check out their version of it too. Cause it's always so different enough that it's usually worth listening to both, you know? Agreed. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. There's an official Stuff You Should Know one called S-Y-S-K podcast. I've got my own called Josh, um, Clark.

I also have a website called R-U-SeriesClark.com. Chuck is on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant. It's facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can also hit him up on facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send all of us, including Jerry and email, to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90's called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say,

bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.