Toxicity of Illicit Substances
March 30th, 2007 by Alex
An interesting article from the American Scientist was published that discusses the ratio of a fatal does to effective dose of almost all the illicit drugs on the market today.
It’s a thought-provoking concept that gives you a visual understanding of the toxicity of many of the drugs we consume today.
As you can see, alcohol is a lot more toxic than most people realize, while marijuana is as non-toxic a substance as you’ll ever come across.
Let’s see what the article has to say on this subject:
The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I’ve found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk.
A simple ratio such as this exposes a large problem in the United States, the least toxic substance know to man is now illegal, and the major cause behind the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
I wonder how long simple, scientific evidence such as this is going to be ignored?
[via The Daily Dish]
