Now, given how little marijuana has been studied or regulated the last hundred or so years, maybe one could chalk the fact that no one has ever officially died from too much weed up to negligence or lack of data.
So let’s look at the numbers we do have.
When the medical community talks about drugs, each one is assigned an “LD-50” rating. This rating indicates at what dosage the drug would cause 50% of the subjects receiving it to die due to toxicity. And, according to a DEA administrative law judge’s 1988 testimony:
“A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana’s LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.”
So, as of September 6th, 1988, no researcher had been able to induce a marijuana-related overdose in a test subject. The LD-50 they eventually came up with was 1:20,000, or 1:40,000. That means a smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times the amount of weed in one joint, all in one sitting.
That’s….20,000 to 40,000 joints. All in one sitting.
Even the most dedicated dabber would find themself passed out on the couch before they could manage to get what essentially equals 1,500 pounds of marijuana into their system.
So smoke easy, knowing you’re way more likely to die from lightning, hippos, walking down the street, the flu, or… where were we? Oh yeah: smoke easy, knowing that pretty much everything is more likely to kill you at any given moment than what you’re packing in that bowl.
Now, isn’t that a comforting thought?
