Sorry, Kids
Jul 31st, 2007 at 8:02 am by Susie
See, there’s no way inhaling tar, ashes and fumes - regardless of the source - can be good for you:
LONDON (Reuters) - Smoking one cannabis joint is as harmful to a person’s lungs as having up to five cigarettes, according to research published on Tuesday.
Those who smoked cannabis damaged both the lungs’ small fine airways, used for transporting oxygen, and the large airways, which blocked air flow, the researchers said.
It meant cannabis smokers complained of wheezing, coughing, and chest tightness, the study by experts at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand found.
The researchers tested 339 people — those who smoked only cannabis, those who smoked tobacco, those who smoked both and non-smokers.
The study found only those who smoked tobacco suffered from the crippling lung disease emphysema, but cannabis use stopped the lungs working properly.
“The extent of this damage was directly related to the number of joints smoked, with higher consumption linked to greater incapacity,” said the authors of the report published in the medical journal Thorax.
“The effect on the lungs of each joint was equivalent to smoking between 2.5 and five cigarettes in one go.”
Time to switch to brownies, eh?
It would be better for your respiratory system, for sure.
Kaiser-Permanente did a twenty year longitudinal study with over 10,000 subjects and found no significant difference between the health of a regular marijuana smoker and the non-smokers.
The Guardian is chronically anti-pot. Not unusual among the “Official Left”.
This is from the Kaiser study abstract - a study which looked only at cancer, not “health” :
Marijuana use also was not associated with tobacco-related cancers or with cancer of the following sites: co lorectal, lung, melanoma, prostate, breast, cervix. Among nonsmokers of tobacco cigarettes, ever having used marijuana was associated with increased risk of prostate cancer (RR = 3.1, CI = 1.0-9.5) and nearly significantly increased risk of cervical cancer (RR = 1.4, CI = 1.0-2.1). We conclude that, in this relatively young study cohort, marijuana use and cancer were not associated in overall analyses, but that associations in nonsmokers of tobacco cigarettes suggested that marijuana use might affect certain site-specific cancer risks.
This study, like so many others, is misleading. How many people actually smoke an entire joint at once? It doesn’t take that many tokes to get one high, certainly far less than the equivalent five ciggies. So extrapolating from that, the amount of THC needed to get one high is probably contained in the equivalent of more like ONE cigarette. So in conclusion: What serial catowner said.
ditto serial catowner and Elayne