How weed can kill you

One of the prime benefits of pot over other drugs is that it generally can’t kill you if you consume too much. Alcohol poisonings alone kill an average of 2,220 per year in the United States. Meanwhile, medical science has yet to find a single fatal cannabis overdose.

This isn’t to say that pot is harmless, however. Below, a quick guide to how marijuana can still stop you from being alive.

Drive while high
This is easily the number one reason marijuana can stop you from reaching old age. Statisticians are still struggling trying to get a handle on the actual death toll of cannabis-impaired driving, mostly because pot-impaired drivers often have other drugs in their system. According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, however, in 2014 marijuana played a role in 436 Canadian crash deaths. One upside, however: In Canada legalization does not appear to have made this problem worse. Several U.S. states saw worrying spikes in cannabis-involved fatal crashes after marijuana was made legal. According to a Canadian Press analysis, Canada appears to have bucked this post-legalization trend.

Smoke too much and get lung cancer
Marijuana is still a plant, and repeatedly lighting a plant on fire and inhaling it can blacken your lungs just as thoroughly as if it were tobacco. However, even the most enthusiastic pot smoker generally isn’t going to be inhaling as much smoke as a pack-a-day cigarette smoker – and the cannabis user also has plenty of non-smoke alternatives at their disposal. It’s for these reasons that medical science remains hesitant to draw a link between cannabis and smoking-related illnesses. However, as a recent report from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer concluded, this might simply be because there aren’t enough cigarette-eschewing heavy pot smokers to study.

Go to your dangerous job while high
People with THC in their bloodstream keep being involved in train wrecks. After a deadly 2016 Amtrak crash, every worker involved was found to have cannabis in their system. An engineer in a 2015 fatal train collision near Roswell, New Mexico was found to have been toking as little as 30 minutes before the accident. After a fiery CP Rail derailment in 2011, one of the engineers responsible had to be hospitalized after he chugged 10 litres of water in the mistaken belief it would flush his body of THC. Scientists still don’t have enough good data to precisely determine what cannabis is doing to workplace safety. A comprehensive report on cannabis safety by the National Academies of Science, for instance, determined “there is insufficient evidence to support or refute a statistical association between general, nonmedical cannabis use and occupational accidents or injuries.” That said, it’s safe to say that popping some edibles before working a shift at the controls of a bulldozer is probably not great for your longevity.

Have a deadly allergy to weed
There is as a small and unfortunate demographic of people who have severe allergic reactions to cannabis. CTV recently interviewed a former OPP officer whose reaction to the plant is so severe that she has been hospitalized by the mere act of touching a marijuana leaf or being near second-hand pot smoke. Medical literature also has evidence of severely allergic patients going into anaphylactic shock due to cannabis exposure. No fatalities yet exist due to a cannabis allergy, but should a severely allergic person take a few strong bong hits at a location far away from medical care, it’s not an impossibility.

Your heart just … stops
In extremely rare cases, an otherwise healthy person will light up a joint and then, just, die. A 2014 German study documented two instances of young men suffering what was described as “sudden unexpected death” due to cannabis intoxication. It wasn’t a cannabis overdose; the two men had simply suffered fatal heart problems sparked by the intake of cannabis. “To our knowledge, these are the first cases of suspected fatal cannabis intoxications where full postmortem investigations … were carried out,” wrote researchers. Other studies have also found a link between cannabis and sudden heart problems such as an irregular heart beat or a risk of stroke, even in otherwise healthy patients. The cases are still rare (two deaths out of millions of pot smokers is virtually a rounding error), but if your heart starts doing somersaults after a few puffs, it might be a good idea to get it checked out.

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