That article is about the harm to society as a whole. Pulling a single line from the article to summarize:

> Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

No, harms to user are also higher and the paper attempts to separate use rates from harms. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

There are lots of ways to measure the harm of drugs. But pretty much all of them result in cannabis being among the least harmful.

Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

This means drinking ~10 times as much as your usual amount of alcohol has a 50% chance of killing you. For cannabis you would need to consume ~30,000 times as much (which is probably not even physically possible).

> Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

That’s a pretty pointless indicator. By that measure marijuana is better for you than water.

That is technically correct if you were to consume abnormal amounts of either substance.

I have read of people dying from consuming too much water.

I have not read that of cannabis.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865