Tobacco is more harmful than Marijuana

I will first address her claims and than move on to my own. I will also not be addressing her claims in order, since that will help with the flow of the debate. The first claim I wish to address the claim "that about 440,000 Americans a year die from tobacco use. " I have two things to point out about this claim, one that makes it false, and one that makes it meaningless even if it were true. 1) If you were to make a tobacco milkshake, than add rat poison to it, drink it and die, would you have been killed by tobacco? No, it would have been the rat poison that killed you. This claim is actually short for "440,000 americans a year die from tobacco product usage. " The fact is that they are dying from other chemicals that are being added to those products and not from the tobacco itself. My opponent also states "that tobacco cigarettes contain over 4,000 different chemicals," but doesn't quite extend that to the truth that it is those added chemicals, not the tobacco that causes the deaths. Tobacco is just getting a bad rap since it the primary ingredient (but not the only). In my arguments later on, I'll go more indepth into the actual effects of the chemicals within tobacco. 2) Even if we accept that the deaths fall on tobacco, that does not make it more harmful. Drowning claims the lives of about 1.2 million people in the world each year [1]. Nuclear bombs claim 0 each year. If we accept that the number of annual deaths represent something's harm, than we must accept that water is more harmful than nuclear bombs and that, in fact, nothing is less harmful than nuclear bombs. Reductio ad absurdum. The second claim I wish to address is "Nicotine has also been proven to be one of the most addictive drugs. " This claim is probably going to be a little harder to tackle, since the addiction of tobacco-based cigarettes is well known. However, what is not well known is why. Actually, we are not fully sure why nicotine is so addicting. Currently, we believe that it ties back to dopamine receptors in the brain, which gives us our feelings of pleasure [3][4]. This is something that is true for all drugs, not just nicotine [4], the reason that nicotine gets such a tight grip on some people is that they may smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, or more. If a person were to smoke 2 dozen joints a day for a month they would also experience heavy addictions (if they even survived). Now to move on to my arguements against the resolution. First, we have to find an accurate way of measuring one plant against another. It is well known that too much of anything can kill you (see water poisoning), so the ideal situation would be to compare X grams of tobacco vs X grams of marijuana. I think comparing 4 g (5 cigarettes) to 4 g (since people roll their joints at different sizes, it is hard to say how many joints this would be, but most of what I found suggested that the average joint was about 1 gram or a little less, so about 4 joints) would be ideal, however, if my opponent wishes to do a different measurement, that is fine too. The average tobacco plant has between 0.6% and 3.0% nicotine of dry weight [2]. So 4 g of tobacco will yield between 24 mg and 120 mg of nicotine. I believe that taking the middle figure woud be ideal (1.8% or 72 mg of nicotine) since a cigarette has about 1.3% of weight as nicotine, this seems accurate. Doing the same with marijuana, we find that marijuana has, on average, between 1.0% and 5.0% THC of dry weight [5]. So by taking the middle (for consistancy), we will use 3.0%. So 4 g of marijuana will yield 120 mg of THC. It would also be worth pointing out how effective getting those chemicals out of the plants and into our bodies, however, due to the fact that different consumption methods have different results, and that it would be nearly imposible to try to cover all the different methods and cross compare them to each other. Since smoking is the most common way of absorbtion (even though there are different ways of ding that, like holding your breath to maximize absorbtion), I believe we should use that. Even though a single cigarette has about 13 mg of nicotine in it, only 1 mg actually enters your blood (7.7% absorbtion rate) [9]. Marijuana is the same if smoked the same way (obviously, if you hold your breath, the absorbtion increases, however, we want everthing to be equal). That brings our numbers down to 9.25 mg for THC and 5.5 mg for Nicotine actually enters the blood through standard absorbtion techniques (out of 4 grams of marijuana vs 4 grams of tobacco). So for an accurate comparison, we should compare 9.25 mg of THC to 5.5 mg of nicotine. Another important thing to consider with the dangers of any substance is how well the body metabolizes it. Nicotine is metabolized by the liver and passed by the kidneys rather simply [2][9] and that the concentrations were off very quickly (as do the effects, which is one reason people smoke multiple times a day), we see that over 60% is gone within 2 hours, or approximately 22.5% per hour. This means that building up to high levels is very difficult, as the body will likely be able to process the nicotine and remove it (like with marijuana, there is never been a recorded OD death from smoking tobacco). When we look at THC, we see something similar, yet slightly different. The motabolites are still psychoactive and are fat-soluble [6]. This means that the drug of THC lasts longer and stays in the body longer (so that build up of the drug is more likely to occur). Infact, the drug will hold about 20% after 5 days [7]. That means that only 0.186% is processed per hour once it is in the fat (or about 4.4% per 1, 24 hours). This, of course varies depending on exercising habits. When you exercise and burn fat, that releases more than the natural rate (which is why if you test, you may not show any trace amounts, than if you exercise, it may come back and be detectable in a urine test). Now the lethal doses for THC are estimated at about 40 mg/kg (when inhaled, it is different for consumed orally) based on studies on rats. This means that an 80 kg person would need to have 3,200 mg of THC enter their blood to kill them. We see that is well above the number that 4 joints would produce (9.25 mg by about 345 times). The estimated lethal doses for Nicotine are about 1 mg/kg (also when inhaled), so that same person would need 80 mg of Nicotine to kill them. We can see that that is also well about the 5 cigarettes would produce (5.5 mg by 14.5 times). This would give the impression that the nicotine in 4 grams of tobacco is closer to the lethal dosage than the THC in 4 grams of marijuana. However, since nicotine passes through the body much more efficiently, this is actually not the case. If one consumes 6 mg of THC per hour, it will eventually build up to a leathal dose (granted, it would take over 100 days of smoking that much every hour). But one must consume 18 mg of nicotine every hour to reach the lethal levels. If we go with the numbers from the 4 grams of our two plants consumed every hour. One would OD from THC in 9 days and 1 hour, while one would never reach the OD limit for Nicotine. I will address non-lethal harms in my next round. Only 8 characters left, lol. [1] . http://www.ilsf.org... [2] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [3] . http://www.respiratoryreviews.com... [4] . http://neuroscience.uchicago.edu... [5] . http://www.nhtsa.gov... [6] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [7] . http://atlantarecoverycenter.com... [8] . http://alcoholism.about.com... [9] . http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org...