DEA approves MDMA for first clinical trials

The thing there is that's not really a fair comparison at all, you're comparing a relatively "normal" amount of consumption on one side to an "excessive" consumption on the other side.

Smoking weed every day isn't the equivalent of eating yourself to house size with sugar.

Smoking a bit of weed every day is like drinking a couple of cans of coke every day, you don't need it to live but doing so is still within relatively normal parameters, pretty harmless. At this end it's pretty much a no-brainer that the Marijuana has more potential for harm than regular old sugar.

If you were to equate the two, eating enough sugar to make yourself massively overweight is like smoking a load of weed every day. Say someone eats a week or two's worth of "normal" sugar consumption every day to get extremely overweight, then the other would need to smoke a week or two's worth of "normal" weed every day for it to be roughly equivalent.

So now you're comparing an obese guy with someone who smokes like 1/8-1/4 of weed every day, quite possibly more? Smoking that much weed is going to cost you a boatload of money for starters, but putting that aside? There are a lot of potential problems that can arise from smoking marijuana at that end of the scale of consumption, lung and respiratory issues are an obvious one, but it's going to do a serious number on a lot of mental functions in regards to memory especially, anxiety and paranoia etc.

I will say that if you're talking at the excess end of the scale, massively excess consumption of sugar is probably worse than smoking yourself retarded every day. Sure you're probably going to be a useless fuck with bad lungs, but obesity causes a lot more significant health issues at this point than smoking and ounce or two per week. I can sort of understand where he is coming from at this end, but if you're talking cases of excess consumption you're really looking at outliers and more extreme cases, and anything is going to cause significant harm in such excessive amounts.

To claim that sugar is somehow worse than marijuana is just silly. Sure, in some cases (especially in cases of massively excess consumption) it can potentially cause greater harm, but in the vast majority of cases with normal use it has almost no negative effects in comparison to some potentially harmful effects of marijuana. It's like saying marijuana is safer than water because people drown in water and nobody has overdosed on marijuana.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - decodedmagazine.com