The Brief

Could smoking pot lead people to drink less alcohol?

In an elaborate and provocative experiment, scientists doled out joints and free drinks to see whether this idea — sometimes described as "California sober" — survived scientific scrutiny.

The new research offers some of the strongest data yet suggesting that smoking weed does, at least in the short term, curb how much people drink.

The findings were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Wednesday — and are sure to raise questions about the merits of swapping one of these substances for another, especially given growing concern in the public health field about the popularity of cannabis.

And the researchers are cautious about making any recommendations based on their findings at this point.

"We're not ready to tell people seeking treatment for alcohol, go ahead and substitute cannabis, and it will work out for you," says Jane Metrik, a professor of behavioral and social science at Brown University who led the study.

But the research does bring scientists closer to understanding the link between these two substances, at a time when many people are leaning on marijuana to cut back on drinking, without waiting for the evidence.

"This study really moves the field forward by helping to resolve one of the unresolved questions in the literature," says Jeff Wardell, a professor of psychology at York University. "This gives us more confidence that there's a real effect here."

Jane Metrik, left, and members of her lab working in the Bar Lab measuring alcoholic drinks and weighing cannabis.

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Nick Dentamaro/Brown University

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Getting high for science

In the Brown study, the team took pains to replicate the real-life circumstances of getting stoned and drinking, while still maintaining a tightly controlled study that could point toward a causal relationship.

They constructed a laboratory that resembles a bar, with comfy seats and a tap, and ensured each participant had their preferred alcoholic beverage on hand.

"We wanted to make sure that when given the opportunity, you would be really driven to drink," says Metrik, who ended up spending substantial time shuttling between liquor stores looking for special vintages and spirits.

The experiment included three separate sessions. In one of them, participants smoked a marijuana joint with higher levels of the psychoactive compound, THC; in another they used a lower potency strain; and the last, researchers gave them a placebo with a trace amount of THC that wasn't enough to get them high.

After toking up in a designated smoking room, each participant spent the next two hours in the "bar lab" on their own where they had the opportunity to drink up to eight mini drinks.

The people who smoked the higher potency cannabis ended up drinking 27% less alcohol, and the lower potency about 19% less, compared to the placebo. People who used cannabis also delayed their drinking.

"It is an important signal that we're detecting," says Metrik. "It is telling us that cannabinoids could play a potential therapeutic role in alcohol use disorder."

Previous research has suggested that cannabis may reduce alcohol cravings and how much people drink. But the results have been largely inconclusive, in part because the data often come from observational studies, which are less reliable and can be muddied by other factors. Animal studies have also indicated potential biological mechanisms behind weed's effect on alcohol; however, there's a question of how much this applies to humans.

The new study also builds on what a team of researchers in Colorado reported earlier this year in a slightly different experiment.

There, participants instead picked up their marijuana from a dispensary, smoked it at home and then visited a mobile lab parked nearby, where they were offered alcoholic beverages.

The amount people ended up drinking dropped by about 25% when they were already stoned. Cravings also went down.

"These findings are all converging on a similar story," says Hollis Karoly, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz who led the study. But she points out there are still big questions about how much you can extrapolate from this new evidence.

A lab member rolls a joint as part of the study of weed's effect on drinking.

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Nick Dentamaro/Brown University

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Replacing one problem with another?

One obvious limitation is that how someone behaves when every sip they are taking is under close observation may not necessarily reflect what happens in a much looser, real-world social setting.

And beyond that, Karoly says this pattern toward reduced alcohol consumption wasn't true for everyone in their study. In a minority of people, it actually led them to drink more.

"This really highlights the fact that individual differences matter," she says.

Another unanswered question centers on who's being studied.

Most of the people in the Brown trial met the criteria for "cannabis use disorder," and about 40% for alcohol use disorder. That could indicate their "drug of choice" was not necessarily alcohol in the first place, says Rajita Sinha, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University.

For people with problem drinking, cannabis might be a potential treatment, she says. This approach, on the other hand, "may also be promoting more cannabis use and that would be problematic."

"Once you're in the throes of daily cannabis use, it's very hard to kick that habit," she says.

Those involved in this work acknowledge the tension in this line of research.

Cannabis doesn't carry the same risks of extreme harm as alcohol, which is a leading cause of preventable death in the U.S and kills more than 170,000 people a year.

But Wardell says cannabis is clearly "not a harm-free substance," either.

While research on its effect has not kept up with its surging popularity, studies have shown marijuana can impair cognition and memory, trigger a serious gastrointestinal syndrome that causes nausea and vomiting, increase the risk of psychosis and other psychiatric illness, and impact relationships and social functioning.

And Wardell says this latest study doesn't actually tell us whether the negative outcomes of alcohol are worse than cannabis in the long run.

"We would have to choose which one for a given individual might be less harmful and make sure that it's not inadvertently just replacing one problem with another," he says.

In her role as a clinical psychologist, Metrik at Brown has seen some patients with severe alcoholism who successfully stopped drinking with the help of cannabis, though some have then gone on to develop issues with that drug.

In her mind, the problem right now is that many people are relying on cannabis to treat their alcohol problems, without any guidance.

"We see this all the time, and we don't know what to tell them," she says. "There's no clear messaging,"
Copyright 2025 NPR

President Donald Trump says he wants the gas tax to be temporarily suspended as the war in Iran extends into its 11th week and keeps oil prices elevated.

He told CBS News Monday morning he wants the tax suspended "for a period of time" and would want it reintroduced "when gas goes down."

Asked by reporters in the Oval Office later in the day how long the gas tax would be suspended, the president responded, "'Til it's appropriate."

Suspending the gas tax would require an act of Congress. Currently, the tax is 18.4 cents per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel.

Regular gasoline cost just under $3 per gallon on average before the U.S. bombed Iran. Now, the average cost per gallon has soared by more than 50 percent to $4.52, according to AAA.

A cost reduction of 18.4 cents would lower that average gasoline cost by around 4 percent. It would bring the cost of a 12-gallon fill-up down by $2.21.

Blockades imposed during the Iran war have stalled the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, causing gas prices to spike. Around one-fifth of the world's crude oil usually travels through that strait.

The potential suspension of the gas tax is a tacit acknowledgment from the White House of the toll that high gas prices have taken on American consumers. Eight in ten Americans say gas prices are straining their budgets, including overwhelming majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.

In addition, 63 percent of Americans say they blame Trump "a great deal" or "a good amount" for those higher gas prices. That includes more than 6 in 10 independents and nearly one-third of Republicans.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Seventeen U.S. cruise passengers returned to the U.S. early Monday, after weeks aboard the MV Hondius, the cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak, the Associated Press reported. The Americans disembarked the cruise in the Canary Islands on Sunday and boarded a medical repatriation flight, arranged by the U.S. government, bound for Nebraska.

The Dutch-flagged cruise ship departed from southern Argentina on April 1, and followed an itinerary across the South Atlantic with multiple stops in remote islands. Three of the passengers have died since the outbreak began.

During the U.S. return flight, one of the Americans tested "mildly" positive for the virus and another showed mild symptoms, according to an X post by the official @HHSGov account. The two potentially affected passengers traveled in biocontainment units aboard the plane, according to the X post.

Also on Monday, a French woman tested positive for hantavirus, French Health Minister Stephanie Rist said. The woman was among five French passengers repatriated Sunday to Paris.

What's ahead for the 17 American passengers

After landing at the Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, most passengers will head to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) for an initial evaluation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The passenger with symptoms will proceed to another specialized treatment center, according to the X post, though it did not specify where that would be.

"For the passengers getting off the ship, I'd say, 'Welcome to Nebraska.' You are coming to the premier facility in the United States, if not the world, to take care of you," says Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at UNMC.

The 17 U.S. passengers are among the total of nearly 150 people who were on the ship from 23 different countries. They've endured in the midst of a hantavirus outbreak which has caused at least eight cases, including three deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

The returning Americans had been isolating in their cruise cabins. They will now be monitored for several more weeks, U.S. health officials said in a media call on Saturday.

Most of the passengers are arriving at America's only federally funded quarantine unit, which also received cruise passengers from a different outbreak — the Diamond Princess Cruise, in early 2020 — which was one of the first known superspreading events of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike COVID, which was a novel pathogenic strain when it emerged, scientists have been studying hantaviruses — and specifically the Andes variant which caused this outbreak — for decades. "We do know that you can get small clusters of disease, but in 30 years we've never seen any large outbreaks," says Khan, "so this is unlikely to become a pandemic."

This strain of hantavirus can be deadly, but it isn't very contagious between people. It tends to take prolonged, close contact with someone who's showing symptoms.

So far, most of the U.S. passengers are well. But symptoms can take up to 42 days after exposure to show up, according to the CDC.

"It's appropriate to be cautious," Khan says, "To monitor these people for 42 days [to make sure] they don't get sick. And if they do get sick during those 42 days, to make sure to put them into isolation."

Health officials said the U.S. passengers would all be assessed clinically upon arrival, though they would not be officially quarantined. They suggested that some passengers could continue monitoring at home, with daily check-ins from their health departments.

Seven U.S. passengers who had left the cruise ship earlier are being monitored in several states, including Texas, California, Georgia and Virginia.

Public health experts have been raising alarms over what they consider to be a muted public response by the U.S. government to this outbreak.

Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says the U.S. response has been fragmented, disjointed, and delayed for weeks, but it's finally coming together. "The CDC was missing in action for quite a long time," he says. "Better late than never — but it is very late."

In response to a request for comment from NPR, Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services: "These claims are completely inaccurate. The U.S. government is conducting a coordinated, interagency response led by the Department of State. HHS, through ASPR [Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response] and CDC, is supporting efforts to protect the health and safety of U.S. citizens, including repatriation, medical evaluation, and public health guidance."

She further described CDC's response activities, including setting up its Emergency Operations Center, deploying teams to the Canary Islands and Nebraska, and notifying state health departments of returning U.S. travelers.

Many of these activities have come recently, and Gostin agrees that the U.S. government is now taking active measures to ensure that the passengers, their families, and the communities they're returning to are safe.

But health officials got lucky this time: the Andes virus is not very contagious, and health officials say this outbreak will likely be contained. The way the U.S. has handled this episode shows glaring gaps in its pandemic preparedness, Gostin says: "If this was a highly transmissible virus, you could imagine what chaos we would be facing now."

Gostin says the U.S. should invest more in infectious disease prevention, containment and control.
Copyright 2026 NPR

General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.

The settlement, announced Friday, is the largest ever for violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that requires companies to tell consumers about how their data is shared and to respect requests to stop the sharing.

It stemmed from an investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, several county district attorneys, and the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces the privacy act. They said General Motors misled drivers who paid for the emergency roadside and navigation service OnStar and made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information, Bonta said, which went to the data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics.

“This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians,” Bonta said in a press release.

The settlement also requires GM to stop selling data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years and submit privacy assessments to the state, among other provisions. It followed a similar agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and GM earlier this year and California settlements with Honda and Ford over the past 14 months for their own violations of the privacy act.

California’s investigation of GM began after a 2024 New York Times investigation found GM collected data about millions of drivers nationwide and sold it to insurance companies in order to charge the drivers higher premiums. Californians were not impacted by those premium hikes because a state law prohibits insurers from using driving data to set insurance rates, Bonta said.

Bonta told CalMatters at a press conference Friday that it’s unclear if location data collected by General Motors was used by other companies to make predictions about the prices people are willing to pay for goods. That practice is better known as surveillance pricing and can leverage location data. Target paid $5 million to settle a suit from San Diego County’s district attorney over its alleged use of location for the technique. Bonta’s office began an investigation into the surveillance pricing practices of businesses in January.

“I understand that there could be some overlap and maybe we'll discover something in our investigation in surveillance pricing, but that wasn't the focus of this case,” he said.

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the case started with one person finding location data in a report they requested about the data collected on them. That discovery, he added, led to investigations by journalists, prosecutors, and regulators.

“This case shows more than anything that one consumer can make a huge difference,” he said.

Though the settlement isn’t much compared to the $2.7 billion in net income that General Motors made last year, Hochman called it an indication that companies should expect higher penalties in the future. California reached a privacy law violation settlement with Disney in February for $2.75 million, previously the largest of its kind.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, General Motors spokesperson Charlotte McCoy said, “This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we discontinued in 2024, and reinforces steps we’ve taken to strengthen our privacy practices. Vehicle connectivity is central to a modern and safe driving experience, which is why we’re committed to being clear and transparent with our customers about our practices and the choices and control they have over their information.”

Californians will soon have a new protection against companies that use their data without their consent. Starting August 1, the more than 500 data brokers registered with the state must comply with requests California residents can make using an online tool known as the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP. The privacy protection agency introduced the tool earlier this year.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.