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Moderate marijuana smoking is not associated with adverse effects on lung function according to a new medical study. The study, Association Between Marijuana Exposure and Pulmonary Function Over 20 Years, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
While moderate tobacco use has been associated with more lung problems, the study found effectively no link between moderate marijuana use and reduced pulmonary function over the long term. From the JAMA press release on the study:
More than half of participants (54 percent; average age at baseline, 25 years) reported current marijuana smoking, tobacco smoking, or both at 1 or more examinations. The median (midpoint) intensity of tobacco use in tobacco smokers was substantially higher (8-9 cigarettes/day) than the median intensity of marijuana use in marijuana smokers (2-3 episodes in the last 30 days). In fully adjusted models that considered 4-level categorizations of current and lifetime exposure to tobacco and marijuana, tobacco smoking (both current and lifetime) was associated with a lower FEV1 and current smoking with a lower FVC. In contrast, exposure to marijuana (both current and lifetime) was associated with higher FVC and lifetime exposure with higher FEV1. At low lifetime exposure levels, increasing marijuana use was associated with an increase in both FEV1 and FVC. “With up to 7 joint-years of life-time exposure (e.g., 1 joint/day for 7 years or 1 joint/week for 49 years), we found no evidence that increasing exposure to marijuana adversely affects pulmonary function,” the researchers write.
(Emphasis mine. “Lung function was assessed by the measurements of forced expiratory volume in the first second of expiration (FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FVC), with lower measures corresponding to poorer lung function.”)
The study did not contain enough very heavy marijuana smokers to reach a firm conclusion about the impact very heavy marijuana use would have on lung function.
30 Comments
more than a tokin’ study?
Good news!
Yet another reason to put people in prison for using cannabis, Obama’s drug czar will no doubt argue.
Ha! Good one.
Pot has been associated with no need for pain killers by people who were injured and that means less Oxy sales.
Tons of Dark People can’t get jobs with Pot Felonies on their record. Dark People get sentenced to more time, higher penalties and are less likely to get pardons.
Rudy had a State campaign chair get busted with I think half a kilo of coke and I think he is out already.
McCain’s wife gets caught with enough drugs to dose my entire old high school and she got no time.
I am tired of waiting for Obama to change things.
Can we get a study about why drug hysteria and big Pharma cash lowers the IQ of Congress?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Everything in moderation applies to dope and power.
This whole thing reminds me of the scare stories I’ve been reading lately about neti pots and yoga. It seems the drug companies, liquor industry and medical providers are in confederacy against holistic approaches that one can control and generate oneself without any commerce involved. Maybe I’m paranoid, however.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite sayings…
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!”
Sometimes being paranoid is just good sense!
Out of curiosity, what are the scare stories about Neti pots & Yoga?
Having practiced yoga & used Neti pots for sinus stuff for well over 30 years (and *rarely* getting ill), I’d love to hear about what’s “wrong” with it. Any links? Just for the heck of it.
For better or worse, I’ve had several friends who had cancer. Using pot either legally or illegally was really a boon to them in terms of greatly reducing nausea and making them feel hungry enough to eat.
Of course, BigPharma just wants to peddle their expensive anti-nausea pills even tho they often do not work as well as mj.
BigPharma is behind most of the effort ag legalizing pot, but that said, a lot of pot growers don’t want it legalized either bc it cuts into their profits. Just saying… there’s a lot of tension around this issue.
My niece’s husband has a bad case of throat cancer from mj. To be sure, he smoked a lot when he was young. He’s a musician (now around 70) and I guess in the day they smoked pretty continuously.
Anyone on this site ever heard of Gary Johnson? He’s running for President and he has a position on this that’s quite different from Obama’s.
I don’t have any links, sorry. But a couple of weeks ago there was a news story about someone who had died in a town near New Orleans after using tap water to neti. Apparently, the water contained “brain-eating amoebas” so they advised to use boiled or purified water to neti, but the tone was alarming. FWIW: They also said the water was safe for drinking, however. To me, the question is whether there is something wrong with the tap water in LA, not with using a neti (which I’ve also done for years). As for yoga, one instructor reported a story from the NYTimes a couple of Sundays ago about people getting hurt doing yoga. didn’t read it bc the instructor said the injured people overextended themselves which I avoid and bc yoga has been so remarkably beneficial to me, as has the neti.
Yeah, I’ve heard of Gary Johnson. He sounds pretty good so far. It’s a damn shame the Debate Commission isn’t required to let minor party candidates and independents in. At least then we’d get some honest discussion of genuine issues instead of the insane drivel we’ll be subjected to as Obama and Romney both pretend to be for the American People instead of the 1%.
Ah. Thanks.
Well fwiw, I only use purified water of some sort when doing Neti, but then I only drink purified water, as well. Sadly tap water is getting worse in our third world nation. As you say, though, it’s not the Neti practice that’s at fault.
Vis yoga injuries: yes, well they do happen, and often it’s because people don’t get good enough instructors *at first,* plus most USA citizens are hyper-competitive (esp the youngsters) and they all think they should *immediately* be capable doing some extremely advanced asana’s on day one. Try doing one those poses featured on the front of Yoga Journal with no prior experience, and believe me, you’re cruising for a bruising.
If I had a dollar for every person who’s said to me: but I simply canNOT do yoga “poses”… I’d be rich. Even if you just get a *little way* into a posture, it’s beneficial.
Anyhoo, long story short: it is relatively easy to injure yourself doing yoga, but there are many ways to avoid that.
After all, it’s relatively easy to injure yourself simply getting out of bed in the morning…
Well, ye olde aphorism is applicable in this case: everything in moderation!
Glad your nephew-in-law is ok, but it’s true that a lot of musicians are well-known for over-indulgence of all sorts.
He’s not really OK. Had second major surgery 2 years ago, has lost all taste, can ingest only liquidy food. On & off bouts with antibiotics, which wreak havoc you know where. But, bless him, he maintains a cheerful demeanor & I like him a lot.
Yeah, even though I think Boston tap water is good and we use a filtration system I’ve begun boiling the water. You’re right about our water supply and our descent into the Third World. We have even become a commodities economy and our chief export now is hydrocarbon fuel. We have a Democratic president allowing an explosion of dangerous and destructive hydraulic land fracturing while ramping up Gulf Oil drilling to record levels even before the oil from the last spill is cleaned up while he plots how to build a pipeline for vile oil dug out of Canadian tar pits. Ravaged land. Poisoned drinking water. Unsafe seafood. Crumbling infrastructure. And this is happening under the “good guys.”
I just depressed myself.
Agree on your point on moderation.
Re: musicians, yes. That’s why I included that info. It’s hard making a living and you have to work in dives, and the general atmosphere does not lead to healthy life styles.
Sorry to hear that. Best to him. Good that he can maintain a positive attitude, as that will take him further down life’s path under his circumstances.
Yeah, I know. And yet there’s so many in Team USA who wave their pom-poms and get starbursts over speechifying about American Exceptionalism that it’s doubly depressing! Talk about denial not being a river in Egypt.
Sadly I fear it will only get worse and too many citizens will be willing and eager for the worst to happen based on not letting poor people “get something for nothing.” Go figure.
Anyone on this site ever hear of Roseanne Barr? She’s running for President and has promised to legalize marijuana.
Tobacco didn’t cause lung problems either until it was first mass marketed as manufactured cigarettes about 110 years ago. We had had cigars, pipes and roll-your-own cigarettes for centuries prior, but it was only about a decade after the industry started mass producing and mass marketing cigarettes that we saw smoking-related COPD and lung cancer.
This study’s findings could more accurately be characterized as having proved that the level of exposure you’re going to see among roll-your-own marijuana users is, just like the level of exposure in roll-your-own tobacco users, not associated with COPD.
The top rate of mj use they could find in enough study subjects to form a group large enough for statistically significant findings was 1 joint/day for a year, the joint-year. Well, with cigarettes, the unit of exposure we use is the pack-year, the use of one pack, or 20 cigarettes/day for a year. In over 20 years of asking people about their cigarette use, I have yet to encounter my first smoker who had a stable, long-term, rate of only one cigarette/day. The things were designed specifically to differ from cigars and hand-rolled cigarettes to be such that “no one can smoke just one”. Such a one/day smoker would take 20 years to accumulate his or her first pack-year. Medically, I would not consider such a hypithjetical person to be a smoker at all, from the point of view of increased risk of anything except maybe thinking him odd.
So it is absolutely not even slightly reassuring that no evidence of COPD was found in a group of mj smokers who dind’t smoke enough that the same number of cigarettes would cause COPD. In fact, if you follow the link to the abstract from JAMA, the authors state that in that group of much heavier mj users that wasn’t large enough to draw statistically significant conclusions, they did indeed find these COPD-type changes. That is exactly what you would expect. Both the loss of pulmonary funciton (of the type that ends in COPD) and the lung cancer risk associated with cigarettes, is not at all thought to realte to tobacco per se. Both seem to be caused by non-specific “tars”, which is the name we give to the witch’s brew of combustion products that smokers inhale. Nothing we know suggests, at all, that mj tars will somehow prove to be innocuous when and if lung tissues that are not designed to be exposed to any combustion products on a daily chronic basis, are ever exposed to similar dose loads as cigarette smokers inflict on themselves.
Legalizing mj would be a good idea if and only if that legalization happens under the strictest possible prohibitions on free commercial exploitation, restrictions designed specifically to insure that the industry doesn’t follow the same game plan with a legalized mj that it implemented with manufactured cigarettes. No pre-made joints, we must keep usage strictly on a roll-your-own basis. No watered-down, low THC product allowed, because that will allow 10-20/day and even higher, levels of pot use. The product has to be kept so strong, that like a fine cigar or pipe, that you can’t practically smoke during the work.
Legalized marijuana is only guaranteed, or even at all likely, to be safe, to not cause another such public health disaster as manufactured cigarettes, if we can keep daily chronic consumption levels in individuals down to levels we see today. But moderate use is bad for profits, so moderate use will find itself under assault from the full arsenal of tools that industry can bring to bear to create such a disaster.
This will come as no surpise to Michael Phelps, and dozens of professional athletes in football, basketball, skiing….
Or any nunber of old hippies and young people of the fifties and sixities, who not only didn’t get cancer, but also didn’t go insane, give themselves brain damage, have children with disabilities, suffer low sperm counts, grow man-teats- or any of the other claims they’ve made during the last seventy years or so. No, most of my friends are successful, not lazy, crazy, or bearded and unwashed (OK, some of them are bearded and unwashed, but that’s because they ride motorcycles, not because they use pot). And they’re walking around defiantly healthy.
Unlikely that marijuana use could be definitively linked to any given throat cancer case as claimed. How can a causative link be established? People that never smoke still get respiratory tract cancers.
I’ve been very encouraged by some of the recent studies. I didn’t notice anyone post the study that discussed that they think that they have determined why some seem to be affected by paranoia and others experience a sense of calm. Supposedly the THC in MJ leads to people becoming hyper focused and detail oriented, it is this component that they believe is responsible for the paranoia. Cannaboid, on the other hand, is what they believe leads to an experience of well being(and how wonderful that we seem to have many receptors for this in our brains). They actually think that cannaboid itself could potentially be used to help treat psychoses.
Anyway I’m looking forward to more evidence to help us determine whether or not opening access to MJ is a good idea.
People compare pot to cigarettes. I get the equivalance but I don’t know if it is a fair one to make(nicotine is physically addictive, MJ is not. You’ll notice I’m not touching psychological addiction which some people appear to be prone towards in everything from shopping to sex.). I really a truly think we need to explore things more before we make it a legal recreational drug.
However, I do think these studies are helpful because they basically are telling us that someone who smokes a joint a day is not at any greater risk then someone who does not to end up with repiratory disease. This means that those who are not prone towards addictive personalities could safely enjoy a joint. They could experience the feeling of well being you get from a cigarette without requiring nicotine.
I read that report and I’m not sure I understand it. It is well known that both CBD and THC are both present in marijuana. Generally, the THC effect is preferred by cannabis users. Moreover, the study in question only concerned smoke when everyone knows that vaporizing is inherently safer bc the cannabis is not combusted.
As to legalization, the real question is why cannabis should be illegal. The harms from criminalization are severe while the harms from use are speculative. Under those conditions, and coupled with the presumption of personal liberty, marijuana should be legal unless and until its opponents make a persuasive case that criminalization is necessary, which cannot be done.