A New Study Turns the World Upside Down: Cannabis Can Save You from Alcohol

Ground-shacking news coming from the scientific community. It looks like cannabis can actually help people who drink too much.

Now, why is this ground-shaking news? Well, for more than one reason.

First of all, there is the relationship between pot smokers and alcohol, which turns this new discovery into a fascinating paradox. As you probably know, especially if you love marijuana, those who enjoy smoking cannabis are often pretty nasty in judging people who drink. To be fair, they kinda deserve the right to behave that way. In fact, because it is legal, alcohol (which many studies tell us is not exactly good for you) has access to a very long list of privileges: it is easy to buy, it is the material representation of “fun”, it is considered classy and elegant (think about wine and liquor), etc. And, of course, the “stinky, dangerous, illegal” cannabis is often left outside in the cold while alcohol enjoys the many cultural celebrations the world has organized in his honor.

Also, isn’t alcohol supposed to be less dangerous than marijuana? Talking about paradox 2.0… amazing. Many people choose alcohol over cannabis, because they want to do the “right”, legal thing, and because they were told that’s just fun while marijuana is so incredibly dangerous and wrong.

So, what did scientists actually discovered? Lili Yang, Raphael Rozenfeld, Defeng Wu, Lakshmi A. Devi, Zhenfeng Zhang and Arthur Cederbaum have recently published an article on the academic journal called Free Radical Biology and Medicine titled Cannabidiol protects liver from binge alcohol-induced steatosis by mechanisms including inhibition of oxidative stress and increase in autophagy. For those who don’t know, steatosis it’s basically the abnormal retention of lipids within our cells. That’s pretty bad and can cause the most awful things you can think about. And what about autophagy? That’s your body getting rid of dysfunctional cellular components. Well, just like the title suggests, the results show that cannabidiol – aka CBD, which comes from cannabis, of course – protects the liver “from acute alcohol-induced steatosis through multiple mechanisms including attenuation of alcohol-mediated oxidative stress, prevention of JNK MAPK activation, and increasing autophagy” (Yang et al., 2014, p. 260).

Incredible, don’t you think? The study is brand new, and we still need to verify each and every claim the authors are pushing forward. Certainly, everything seems to suggest that you should really choose cannabis over alcohol, even if you drink alcohol.