How Much Weed Does It Take To Overdose?

Wondering how much weed it takes to overdose?

Public opinion on marijuana is starting to change. The reason its illegal is because the government still thinks cannabis can be dangerous. However, they haven’t given us much reason to believe that. Drugs like heroin are illegal because they come with a risk of lethal overdose. On the other hand, no one has died of a marijuana overdose yet. Probably because it’d take an impossible amount pot to overdose. We’ve seen a man take a 22 gram dab and live to tell the tale. That’s about as much THC as anyone can get into their system in one sitting. So, just how much weed would does it take to overdose?

Marijuana Overdose Rating

How do we decide whether someone could overdose from a particular substance? Well a 1988 United States administrative law hearing found that:

“Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug-induced toxicity.”

The hearing also noted, “some 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.”

As a result, researchers have been left to guess marijuana’s LD-50 or overdose rating. As of now, the estimate is “that marijuana’s LD-50 is between 1:20,000 and 1:40,000.

How Many Joints Would It Take To Overdose?

You’d have to smoke 20 to 40,000 joints before dying. Not only that, they’d all have to be above average sized joints. One study found the average sized joint to be .66 grams. Another study said that most joints only have about .32 grams of weed in them.

If you’re planning to off yourself with weed, you’re going to have to fatten up those joints and smoke fast. Each one of the 20,000 plus joints would need about .9 grams in it. Not to mention, researchers estimate you’ll need to smoke them all in 15 minutes to die. That’s 1,500 pounds of marijuana in 15 minutes. Good luck gathering that much weed and consuming it all in a quarter of an hour.

Could Dabs Cause A Marijuana Overdose?

Even with the potency of highly concentrated cannabis extracts, creating a lethal dose will still be tricky. Dabs are about 3-4 times more potent than regular weed.

To overdose with dabs, you would still need hundreds of pounds of concentrate. Additionally, all of it would have to be consumed in a 15-minute span. People have passed out from a fraction of a gram of wax so you’d be out way before you could finish hundreds of pounds.

Final Hit

The fact that marijuana can relieve chronic pain without the risk of addiction leads us to wonder why the DEA insists on leaving it on schedule I. Even with recreational marijuana states growing in number and Americans using more cannabis than ever before, no one has died from it. So is there an amount that can kill you? Yes. Can you ingest that amount in enough time to kill yourself? No. So, patients with access to medical marijuana can sleep without worrying about their medicine accidentally killing them. The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s 2016 Facts & Figures noted that “drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US, with 52,404 lethal drug overdoses in 2015,” heavily contrasting the 0 deaths caused by marijuana overdose in history.