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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Alcohol is indeed dangerous, but I think it is misleading to compare the number of lives ended by alcohol to the number of lives ended by other recreational drugs just because there is a much larger number of people consuming alcohol. Almost everybody who consumes alcohol is not an alcoholic.

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you should go look back at profiling and optimization

if you want to fix the most things with the least effort, you optimize the hot paths. in this case, thats alcohol and tabacco. they have the biggest opportunity

That's dumb though because then you just push people to other things and you will see the same issues arise as consumption increases to alcohol levels and there's a reasonable probability they will be worse. Already the percent of fatal accidents involving active marijuana found in the blood stream is higher than alcohol car fatalities. 40% vs 30%. Homicides show a similar pattern. And marijuana consumption is only 17% vs 54%. All time high for MJ and near all time low for alcohol.

Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.

What is “active marijuana?”

It means they had recently consumed marijuana enough to be consider under the influence of it. Marijuana that had not yet cleared the bloodstream. Active comes from active metabolites, their body was still metabolizing recently consumed marijuana.

That's in opposition to the inactive metabolites which are stored in fat and slowly secreted via urine for a period much longer than someone is under the influence of marijuana.

So saying active means that their body was still processing it and the brain CB receptors are still being engaged. Whether or not they were "high" might be debatable, but considering it's showing up in a FAR higher amount of the people involved in fatal accidents than any group of the general public it's a pretty reasonable conclusion that it played a role.

I optimize the things where I get the most benefit per hour of work. Banning alcohol is so difficult politically that it’s not obvious that this is the best thing to work on to improve public health.

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