Does Weed Help Hangovers? Cannabis Is The Cure

While mixing weed and alcohol isn’t typically the best idea, weed is a good choice for the day after a night of drinking. Does weed help hangovers? Can weed prevent hangovers? Here’s everything you need to know.

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What happens when you’re hungover?

If you drink, you’re probably familiar with some of the negative effects of alcohol already. The leading cause of a hangover is dehydration. Since alcohol increases your urine production and makes you sweat, you become dehydrated more easily, resulting in a pounding headache, thirst, and dizziness.

Further, alcohol also expands your blood vessels, which can cause a severe headache the next day. This also triggers an inflammatory response that decreases your appetite and impairs memory and motor skills. This inflammation also irritates your stomach lining by increasing your stomach acid. That typically involves stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea the next day.

Does weed help hangovers?

Luckily, the effects of marijuana naturally soothe away many of these symptoms. One of the key effects of smoking marijuana is that cannabis reduces inflammation. Weed does indeed help hangovers because it treats the symptoms and also acts as an anti-inflammatory. Best of all, the only major side effect of weed is dry mouth, which, in the end, helps us to consume more water and rehydrate after a night of drinking.

There is also much anecdotal evidence from long-standing medical marijuana patients, users, and medical professionals to support that weed might be the perfect hangover cure. Below we’re breaking down the effect of weed against hangover symptoms.

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How does weed help hangovers?

As we mentioned in the first section, the side effects of alcohol consumption can lead to a hangover the next day. However, weed can help reduce the effects of these symptoms, allowing you to get your body on the road to recovery. It helps you get rest, manage symptoms, correct your appetite and nausea, and get more fluids into your body. To investigate whether or not weed helps hangovers, we’re taking a closer look at the relationship weed shares with the symptoms.

1. Weed improves sleep — The worst hangovers are the ones where you’re up late and still wake up early in the morning. With very little sleep, many of the symptoms of a bad hangover are made worse by lack of sleep. Alcohol makes it harder to get a restful sleep, even if you do get your full 8 hours. Sometimes the answer to a hangover is to sleep it off since sleeping gives the liver a chance to flush alcohol from the system. Smoking an indica-dominant strain before a nap can help you get some more rejuvenating sleep while you manage the rest of your symptoms. 
2. Weed helps with headaches — Many medical patients use marijuana for headaches and migraines already. THC can raise your resting heart rate and jump-start your metabolism, helping you to pump the toxins that cause a hangover out of your system. Further, cannabis increases blood flow to the brain, which can improve the thumping sensation of a hangover headache. 
3. Weed increases appetite — During a hangover, nausea can sometimes put us off of eating and drinking, even though that will help make us feel better. Eating fatty foods before drinking can reduce the impact of a hangover, but healthy foods like eggs and avocados are great when you’re in the middle of a hangover. Both of these foods can help clear the liver of the toxin that causes hangovers. The THC found in marijuana is known for causing munchies, which can make us more inclined to eat food and drink water. Eating and drinking help purge our systems of these toxins and kickstart our bodies into processing and feeling better. 
4. Weed reduces nausea — It’s been well-documented by medical marijuana patients that cannabis is great against nausea. Many cancer patients also use weed to reduce nausea or an upset stomach, which is one of the top side effects for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. While alcohol irritates your stomach lining, cannabis can reduce that inflammation. It also reduces stomach pain and can act as an antioxidant, reducing the seasick feeling of nausea to a more manageable level without using Tums or Pepto Bismol.

Does weed prevent hangovers?

While smoking weed can curb the negative effects of an alcohol hangover, weed can’t prevent a hangover in the slightest. In fact, it can actually make the symptoms of a hangover the next day worse.

Consuming alcohol and marijuana together is known as cross-fading, and the cross-fade can be deadly. It’s best to stick to either alcohol or marijuana on a night out, as consuming both can be dangerous. When you smoke weed after drinking alcohol, weed enhances the effects of the alcohol and can make you feel even more intoxicated.

Cross-fading can cause a bad case of spins, dizziness, profuse sweating, and even vomiting. All of these side effects lead to dehydration, which is the main cause of a hangover in the first place. Further, starting with weed and then drinking can make it take longer for the effects of alcohol to take hold, meaning that you won’t feel as drunk as you really are, urging you to consume more alcohol, inevitably leading to a hangover.

If you decide to consume marijuana with alcohol, use caution. Stay in a safe environment and stay hydrated. Weed won’t prevent you from getting a hangover, so it’s best saved for when you’re not drinking or when you’re actively experiencing a hangover.