Study: A Joint May Be Easier On Lungs Than A Cigarette

[salvorhardin]

Interesting finding, on a fairly large, longitudinal data set. I wonder how much lung function impairment the heavy pot users had, compared to long term cigarette smokers. I also wonder if they attempted to acount for other lifestyle factors (e.g. exercise) and obesity.

The latest study is typical: It shows that pot smokers' lung function actually improves, at least if they're not smoking a lot.

Smoking a joint a week for up to seven years doesn't hurt lung function, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. They came up with that number after following more than 5,000 people for 20 years. The results were just published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In fact, those occasional pot smokers actually had improvements in some measurements of lung function. That may be due in part to the stretching involved in the deep tokes typical of marijuana use. By contrast, both past and present cigarette smokers had impaired lung function.

But the pot smokers didn't get a completely clean bill of health. Heavy marijuana users, which the study defined as smoking more than 20 times a month, did see a decline in lung capacity. But that's after exposure to more than 10 "joint-years," which the scientists calculated as a joint a day for a decade. That's a fair amount of weed.

Link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/10/144978033/study-a-joint-may-be-easier-on-lungs-than-a-cigarette

[Ron Obvious]

1. Quantity...

Last edited Tue Jan 10, 2012, 07:56 PM - Edit history (1)

I neither know dope smokers who smoke the equivalent of two packs a day, nor cigarette smokers who only smoke one or two cigarettes daily, so I'd say the two are hardly comparable in any case.

[salvorhardin]

2. On the other hand, marijuana smoke doesn't contain hundreds of added chemicals as most cigarettes do

Yeah, the quantity difference was my first thought too. Even the heaviest marijuana users were using the equivalent of a single joint per day. Yet it does jive with other research on the effects of marijuana smoke on the lungs. Marijuana smoke just seems to be less injurious to the lungs. In the end though, it's an interesting study, but it's just one study. Hardly anything to set policy by.