Good news: marijuana's not actually bad for your lungs
By Virginia SmithJanuary 11th, 2012, 8:00 pmComments (9)
In case acute health-consciousness has been the only thing holding you back from going through life pleasantly stoned, you can finally start living the dream: new research indicates that not only is smoking weed not damaging to your lungs, it may actually improve certain aspects of lung function.
While lung performance predictably deteriorated the more a subject in the study smoked cigarettes, the same did not hold true for pot smokers, whose lung volume and air-flow rates actually improved with every "joint-year" smoked, i.e. a cumulative 365 joints or pipe bowls. "This particular potential complication of marijuana smoking doesn't appear to be an important risk," explained one of the researchers. "Therefore, people who are using marijuana for medicinal purposes or recreationally at least could be reassured that they're not harming their lungs in this way."
Theories differ on why this may be the case, and some suggest that all that practice with deep inhalation would skew lung-test results in favor of stoners. Any improvements were minimal though, and the researcher said, "It's a very real increase... but it's so small that I don't think that a person would feel a benefit in terms of their breathing [...] We don't know exactly what's happening inside all of the airways of the individuals who are measured."
Okay, so it's not going help your chances of winning a triathlon, but I'd still call this a pretty big victory for those of you on Team Weed.
Commentarium (9 Comments)
Every day spent high is a day spent victoriously.
Article seems ligitamate...
Awwww Yeah! Score 1 for Team Weed. ^_^
This is probably a dumb question; not to well versed in weed. But what about lung cancer? Can marijuana cause lung cancer or emphysema if not combined with cigarettes?
Worth mentioning: if you smoke cigarettes AND weed habitually, well, that's way fucking worse than just smoking either one on its own.
Weed smokers inhale deeper + hold their breath in longer out of habit, and this happens when they smoke cigs too, thus forcing all those yummy carcinogens deeper into their lungs for longer periods of time.
"At the highest levels of pot smoking -- using marijuana more than 20 times in a month, or having over 10 lifelong joint-years worth of smoking -- lung function seemed to decline again, but the researchers noted that there weren't enough heavy marijuana users in their study population to be sure of that."
The LA Times story also mentions adverse brain changes.
Not such good news.
I have a hard time believing this. From all that I've read, inhaling ANY kind of smoke, whether it be cigarettes, weed, or sitting around a campfire, will damage your lungs due to carcinogens and soot. I don't understand why weed (when smoked) would be an exception to this.
yeah i think its a load of shit.
This must be a US-centric study, right? Cos in the UK, at least back in the day when all those naughty guys in my dorm (but not me, not ever, Mom, well, actually just the once but I didn't inhale) you can't get weed, only little blocks of hash resin, and if you wanna smoke that you have to scrape it into a joint filled with loose tobacco, so you're smoking *both*, and damn did everyone have a raspy cough.
I call BS. Anyone who truly states that smoking weed is less harmful than cigarettes is really pretty ignorant, IMO. You may smoke joints less than you do cigarettes, but the actual HARM is not less.
The study seems to be focusing on air flow and lung volume - but what about the impact of all those carcinogens building up in the body? What about the risks of oral, esophageal, and lung cancers? The impact of long-term smoking and cognitive functioning? What about addressing the social belief that "smoking makes me a better driver because I get more paranoid"?
Not trying to be a narc over here, but come on.
Now you say something