Youth AOD workers are always encouraging young people to weigh up harms and benefits of their use. Defining and Measuring harm is not an easy thing to do.

The specific context of a young person’s situation always needs to be considered and for that reason youth workers tend not to construct a hierarchy of drugs. For instance Nora Volkow, Director of the National Drug Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the US explains that tobacco is clearly the number one killer among drugs and contributes to massive chronic harm but on the other hand, when you smoke a cigarette, it doesn't impair your brain's cognitive capacity such as alcohol or cannabis which can create risk of acute harm.

Check out this interesting interview with Nora Volkow which compares some of the harms of tobacco with cannabis.