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Smoking Marijuana does not cause lung cancer

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Pot is not like tobacco

The Effects of Marijuana Smoke

There are many reasons why marijuana is not worse
for you than smoking cigarettes. You may have heard
that “one joint is equal to ten cigarettes” but this is
exaggerated and misleading. Marijuana does contain more tar
than tobacco but low tar cigarettes cause just as much
cancer, so what is that supposed to mean? Scientists have
shown that smoking any plant is bad for your lungs, because
it increases the number of ‘lesions’ in your small airways.
This usually does not threaten your life, but there is a
chance it will lead to infections. Marijuana users who are
worried about this can find less harmful ways of taking
marijuana like eating or vaporizing. (Be careful
marijuana is safe to eat but tobacco is not, you might
overdose!) Marijuana does not cause cancer the way
tobacco does, though.

Here is a list of interesting facts about marijuana smoking
and tobacco smoking

o Marijuana smokers generally don’t chain smoke,
and so they smoke less. (Marijuana is not physically
addictive like tobacco.) The more potent marijuana
is, the less a smoker will use at a time.

o Tobacco contains nicotine, and marijuana doesn’t.
Nicotine may harden the arteries and may be
responsible for much of the heart disease caused by
tobacco. New research has found that it may also
cause a lot of the cancer in tobacco smokers and
people who live or work where tobacco is smoked.
This is because it breaks down into a cancer causing
chemical called N Nitrosamine’ when it is burned
(and maybe even while it is inside the body as well.)

o Marijuana contains THC. THC is a bronchial dilator,
which means it works like a cough drop and opens up
your lungs, which aids clearance of smoke and dirt.
Nicotine does just the opposite it makes your lungs
bunch up and makes it harder to cough anything up.

o There are benefits from marijuana (besides bronchial
dilation) that you don’t get from tobacco. Mainly,
marijuana makes you relax, which improves your health
and well being.

o Scientists do not really know what it is that causes
malignant lung cancer in tobacco. Many think it may
be a substance known as Lead 210. Of course, there
are many other theories as to what does cause cancer,
but if this is true, it is easy to see why no case of lung
cancer resulting from marijuana use alone has
ever been documented, because tobacco contains
much more of this substance than marijuana.

o Marijuana laws make it harder to use marijuana
without damaging your body. Water pipes are illegal
in many states. Filtered cigarettes, vaporizers, and
inhalers have to be mass produced, which is hard to
arrange underground.’ People don’t eat marijuana
often because you need more to get as high that way,
and it isn’t cheap or easy to get (which is the
reason why some people will stoop to smoking leaves.)
This may sound funny to you but the more legal
marijuana gets, the safer it is.

It is pretty obvious to users that marijuana prohibition
laws are not “for their own good.” In addition to the
above, legal marijuana would be clean and free from
adulterants. Some people add other drugs to marijuana
before they sell it. Some people spray room freshener on it
or soak in in chemicals like formaldehyde! A lot of the
marijuana is grown outdoors, where it may be sprayed with
pesticides or contaminated with dangerous fungi. If the
government really cared about our health, they would form an
agency which would make sure only quality marijuana was
sold. This would be cheaper than keeping it illegal, and it
would keep people from getting hurt and going to the
emergency room. Source

FACT Studies have shown that smoking marijuana does NOT increase your chance of getting cancer and may even lower it slightly! Of course, vaping or eating cannabis are still considered the safest methods of ingestion especially for daily consumers.

Early on, when our research appeared as if there would be a negative impact on lung health, I was opposed to legalization because I thought it would lead to increased use and that would lead to increased health effects, Tashkin says. But at this point, I d be in favor of legalization.
Tobacco smoking causes far more harm. And in terms of an intoxicant, alcohol causes far more harm.

UCLA s Tashkin studied heavy marijuana smokers to determine whether the use led to increased risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. He hypothesized that there would be a definitive link between cancer and marijuana smoking, but the results proved otherwise.

What we found instead was no association and even a suggestion of some protective effect, says Tashkin, whose research was the largest case control study ever conducted.

Listen to Tashkin’s full video here.

UPDATE

A new study, published in January 2012 Journal of the American Medical Association, tested the lung function of over 5,000 young adults between 18 and 30. After 20 years of testing, researchers found some buzzworthy results regular marijuana smokers (defined by up to a joint a day for seven years) had no discernible impairment in lung activity from non smokers.

In fact, researchers were surprised to find marijuana smokers performed slightly better than both smokers and non smokers on the lung performance test. Why? The most likely explanation seems to be that the act of inhaling marijuana holding each puff in for as long as possible is a lot like a pulmonary function test, giving marijuana smokers an edge over their cigarette smoking counterparts.

For most of human existence, cannabis has been considered a medicine. Queen Victoria used it to alleviate her menstrual cramps. Extracts were prescribed by doctors and available at every pharmacy in the U.S. According to Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, attitudes toward cannabis only shifted when Americans began to notice and object to its use by immigrants around the turn of the 20th century. More here.

Selby, sweanor & hughes: e-cigarettes could save the government billions

Patriot brand cigarettes – thrilling adventure hour wiki

Innovation is a powerful thing. It has dramatically increased our quality of life, and the entrepreneurial spirit behind it continues to amaze us. If someone from 1964 were to see the computers, automobiles or medical diagnostics we have today, they would be astounded. But former U.S. surgeon general Luther Terry, who released the first ground breaking Report of the Surgeon General on Smoking and Health 50 years ago, would be saddened that cigarettes have not appreciably changed. They are still the same deadly and defective delivery system for nicotine and they remain, by far, the leading cause of preventable death, despite sound policy and improved treatment.

Rowan Warr Hunter E cigarettes Freedom to vape

If you want to understand what life is like for the Canadian entrepreneurs who are seeking to serve the growing demand for electronic cigarettes, consider me. My family and I own an online vaping business, along with a brick and mortar store located in Trenton, Ont.

There are four of us involved in the operation, with a total of 90 years of smoking traditional cigarettes between us. All of us have been smoke free for close to three years since we started vaping. Each one of us had tried every available cessation product on the market (medications, patches, gum, inhalers, cold turkey, hypnosis and acupuncture) with zero success at leaving cigarettes behind. One by one, we each switched to electronic cigarettes, and one by one each of us tossed out our ashtrays and lighters in favour of batteries and clearomizers. We were so impressed with our own success that we opened our business in 2012.

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Although there has been little to no innovation in cigarettes (evidence suggests they may actually be more harmful today than they were in the past), there have been great advances in potentially massively less harmful ways to deliver nicotine to the body, such as electronic cigarettes. Unfortunately, Health Canada s policy to these game changing devices has been confused, to say the least.

We have known for decades that smokers smoke for the nicotine, but die from the smoke. It is the latter that is the overwhelming cause of the cancers, as well as heart and lung diseases. In other words, it s the smoke, stupid. Were we to ingest caffeine by smoking rather than brewing tea leaves, the result would likely be the same. Approximately five million Canadians (one in five adults) continue to smoke cigarettes and get exposed to roughly 7,000 chemicals, including 60 that cause cancer. Others face health risks due to second hand smoke. Many treatments for nicotine addiction, including nicotine gums and patches, are more effective than quitting cold turkey, but still not optimal.

Failure to distinguish between the nicotine and the smoke leads society to miss a huge opportunity to address the seemingly intractable problems associated with cigarette smoking. The quit or die approach is unethical. It is akin to thinking that anyone who drove a car the 1960s, when there were much less stringent safety standards, should totally forgo driving, rather than have easy access to alternate, potentially less risky, products.

Entrepreneurs have found a way to meet the needs those unable, or unwilling, to forgo nicotine by developing, marketing and selling products that can deliver the drug in ways that promise to reduce the associated health risks, simply by getting rid of the smoke. Electronic cigarettes, which deliver nicotine in a combustion free vapour, are currently the most visible example. But these products are just the beginning of what has the potential to be a tsunami of innovation that could do to smoking what sanitation did to cholera. The products on the market today are just the beginning.

Ban on nicotine loaded e cigarettes aggressively enforced while some anti smoking advocates call for legalization
Proposed ban of too realistic e cigarettes by European Union draws ire of proponents of nicotine devices

Over a billion smokers worldwide are spending over $800 billion a year on cigarettes. The desire for a safer alternative, however, has led to massive growth in e cigarette sales. The private sector has an incentive to meet this demand, and if it’s done right, we could have a self funding public health revolution, with the potential to save the health care system billions of dollars by reducing the prevalence of diseases caused by inhaling smoke.

This has happened before. Only a couple of decades before that first surgeon general’s report, stomach cancer was the leading cause of cancer deaths. But within 50 years, it had been relegated to a minor cause of mortality. This was largely due to refrigeration. Manufacturers were able to harness the technology and innovate to make the products more consumer friendly, promoting healthier diets and the subsequent reduction in stomach cancer cases. Such actions by the private sector are easily replicable because they are profitable and thus don’t require government subsidies. We now have the potential to virtually eliminate lung cancer and many other smoking related diseases. Such a revolution in public health would be among the biggest in history. It would work with, rather than against, the market to make combustible tobacco obsolete.

Unfortunately, in Canada, the legal framework cannot cope well with innovation in this domain and can only see nicotine in terms of its past as being either a “tobacco product” or a “medicine.” It appears that Health Canada decided that since e cigarettes were not a tobacco product, they must be a medicine. As a result, the agency banned e cigarettes that contain nicotine, because they did not meet the exacting standards for medicines. E cigs, of course are not a medicine, but rather a replacement consumer product with the potential to dramatically reduce health risks.

There are, of course, risks in any policy changes, but the status quo, which equates to another million Canadian dying from smoking in the next 25 years, must be the talisman from which alternative policy approaches are judged.

A legitimate Health Canada monitored marketplace would be a worthy goal

To maximize the benefits of innovation, we need fit for purpose regulations aimed at harnessing market forces for the greatest possible reduction in smoking related diseases. Governments have a responsibility to enact progressive regulations that allow citizens to reduce their exposure to dangerous products, when viable alternatives become available.

As with any policy measure, we need to find a correct balance, and we need to deal effectively with any unintended consequences (no one wants to sell nicotine products to kids, for instance), and a legitimate Health Canada monitored marketplace would be a worthy goal. What should be the blinding reality in all of this is that it is not often that we can empower entrepreneurs to save lives, while creating jobs, paying taxes and very possibly creating new, world class Canadian companies. Since when is there a problem with doing well by doing good?

National Post

Dr. Peter Selby is associate professor in the departments of Family and Community Medicine and Psychiatry and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and Chief Addictions Division CAMH. David Sweanor is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa. Dr. John R. Hughes is a professor at the University of Vermont School of Medicine.