Booze or weed: What’s worse for your health?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A renewed focus on alcohol’s health effects has rekindled a common debate: Is alcohol or marijuana worse for you? Sorry, folks, but the short answer is that both can be bad. “The reality is, if you’re really worried about your health, you wouldn’t use either of them," says Ryan Vandrey, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who helps run the Cannabis Science Lab.

The longer answer: The question is complicated by the fact that alcohol has been widely studied for decades, while research into cannabis, particularly in edible form, is still catching up. “People are pretty mindful of the fact that if they drink copious amounts of alcohol over longer periods of time, they will have health effects," says Staci Gruber, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. “Cannabis isn’t as clear in terms of the literature." There are certain negative effects that both substances share: They impair short- and long-term cognitive functioning.

This impairs judgment, attention span and coordination, raising the risk of vehicle accidents, falls and other injuries. Both can also become addictive and can have significant mental-health consequences, particularly when overused. Some people say THC—the psychoactive compound in cannabis that gets you high—doesn’t disrupt sleep the way alcohol does or result in a hangover.

But doctors say it can leave some people groggy the next day. Cannabis may be lower in calories than alcohol but both substances can have the net effect of causing people to eat more, the so-called munchies. Alcohol is in the hot seat.