Good News for Herbivores

Even I was surprised to read this:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Marijuana smoking does not increase a person's risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.

They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.

Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

So, heavy tobacco smoking is 20 times more likely to give you cancer than heavy pot smoking. And yet we legally allow people to smoke tobacco, so long as they hide out in a hole in the ground where no one can see them and take short, quick puffs. Wot's, uh, the deal?

The results should not be taken as a blank check to smoke pot...

[Interrupting a bong rip] What? Oh, now they tell me.

...which has been associated with problems like cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis, said Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. He was not involved in the study.

Well, cognitive impairment's the whole reason to take up pot smoking in the first place. If people were terrifically concerned about cognition, they'd spend their free time reading Thomas Hardy novels or conducting scientific experiments. As for chronic bronchitis well...yeah, that just sucks. No one wants to be coughing up stuff all day, and if you are in that unfortunate condition, it may as well be tuberculosis. Which is more romantic.

The study was confined to people under age 60 since baby boomers were the most likely age group to have long-term exposure to marijuana, said Dr. Donald Tashkin, senior researcher and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Previous studies showed marijuana tar contained about 50 percent more of the chemicals linked to lung cancer, compared with tobacco tar, Tashkin said. In addition, smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco.

"Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there's less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled," Tashkin said in a statement.

"And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers -- they hold their breath about four times longer, allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lung."

So the study only experimented with joints, then, I take it? This overlooks the extraordinarily widespread use of pipes or bongs (or so I've heard). I've got to imagine a gravity bong or some such thing is worse for your lungs than toking a joint a few times. But what do I know? Unlike Dr. Donald Tashkin or Robert Pollard, I am not a scientist.

Hansen-Flaschen also cautioned a cancer-marijuana link could emerge as baby boomers age and there may be smaller population groups, based on genetics or other factors, still at risk for marijuana-related cancers.

This is pretty cool. It's like having a whole large population of test subjects. If people my parents age (but not them, because they're both high on life) start dropping like flies at 60 from diseases caused by their drug use in the 60's (highabetes, say, or shroomatism), I'll probably have enough time to quit before I get too old. Way to go, hippies!