Marijuana Not Linked To Lung Cancer

poledriver said:
Yeah they do, i know some people (and used to know others) who do when they havent got any buds or cant get any buds and the leaves are all they have, some people who grew for example and were waiting for the buds, so they'd trim the leaves, dry them and smoke them. I've done it a bit ages ago, tastes horrible and hardly gets you stoned.
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Don't do that, that's crazy.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
That chart talks about the tar content of cannabis smoke vs. tobacco smoke. However, is that chart talking about the tar content of marijuana bud, or the tar content of marijuana leaves?
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You need to stop worrying about tar contents of cannabis and tobacco plants. It has caused way too many posts by you, if you don't understand it by now I doubt you will.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
That chart talks about the tar content of cannabis smoke vs. tobacco smoke. However, is that chart talking about the tar content of marijuana bud, or the tar content of marijuana leaves?
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The leaves don't usually have that much THC in them. So one look at the chart can tell you it probably wouldn't be the leaves.
 
bloodshed344 said:
Now, don't be a spammer and just say that you're wrong. You can't rebut just by repeating yourself. Study has been done on this and you can't say those guys are using stoner logic or don't know (yeah they don't know it and they get fucking paid to do it, while you speculate for free).

Who am I going to trust, multiple studies and hundreds of years of evidence or Psychedelic Jay... Damn I'm not sure!


Are you just arguing because you're ashamed of being a tobacco smoker? Or are you just not ashamed and ignorant, good traits.
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I’m saying that you can’t prove that weed isn’t killing people based off of any info currently available.

No, I am not ashamed of any drug use.

I am not ignorant either, and nor did I say you were.

I repeat myself because people seem to be coming to a conclusion with no actual base... Most stuff that applies to tobacco also applies to weed.

There is no “years of evidence" because you can’t have evidence with no actual complete study. But, based off common knowledge, smoking anything will lead to lung disease.

My conclusion does have a base. And.... Smoking period kills people. Smoking will not heal you, nor will it improve any aspect of your life besides creativity and what becomes of it...
 
Psychedelic Jay said:
I’m saying that you can’t prove that weed isn’t killing people based off of any info currently available.

No, I am not ashamed of any drug use.

I am not ignorant either, and nor did I say you were.

I repeat myself because people seem to be coming to a conclusion with no actual base... Most stuff that applies to tobacco also applies to weed.

There is no “years of evidence" because you can’t have evidence with no actual complete study. But, based off common knowledge, smoking anything will lead to lung disease.

My conclusion does have a base. And.... Smoking period kills people. Smoking will not heal you, nor will it improve any aspect of your life besides creativity and what becomes of it...
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Decades ago, everybody thought that tobacco smoking was harmless. They had no idea that it caused cancers. But nothing could be further from the truth-both tobacco smoking and marijuana smoking can cause lung cancer.

Isn't history repeating itself?

People are treating marijuana nowadays like they treated tobacco in the past-they are in denial of its harms.
 
His guess isn't wrong because no one truly knows.
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I don't think there is any claim quite so vapid and inane as "no one truly knows". The entire body of human knowledge is subject to doubt, obviously, but in rational discourse a valid contribution consists generally of a falsifiable concept backed up by scientific evidence, and "no one truly knows" only detracts from the utility of the discourse. The only thing that can be reasonably discussed with any seriousness is the peer-reviewed scientific research available today. If that evidence contradicts your claim, you are wrong, for the only reasonable definition of wrong that can be considered.

sekio said:
What's wierd is that nicotine per cigarette has been dropping steadily since the 1960's.
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Nicotine has increased since the last year of that data.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598548/
 
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While this is agreeable... Bickering over complete and udder misunderstood and highly subjective information on the most part is helping no one in this case (smoker or non-smoker). ...there is really no concrete information on just what weed actually does as far as cancer wise. Which IMHO means "no one really knows"

There is just a big lack of "the juicy details". It reads as though most of the studies were just "given up"....

But, we do know for sure and have sure grounds on what inhaling products of combustion does.

I underline these words for the sure fact that they are what we really are discussing.

I personally have vowed to agree to disagree, but still make my points. But, after being shot down countless times by logic that people have confused themselves with and actually added to my point the whole time, I am simply baffled.


*Throws hands in the air after typing this and being rapidly confused as to why we are making as big of a deal as we are.*
 
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sekio said:
commercially grown tobacco has the following carcinogens (off the top of my head)

nitrosamines (from smoke curing)
polonium-210 (from phosphate fertiliser)
polycyclic aromatics and small-molecule combustion products (from combustion)
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Oh! Also: polonium content of tobacco is a concern only when the tobacco is smoked, due to a hypothesized potential for polonium to collect at bronchial branching points and expose these to drastically elevated levels of radioactivity relative to the radioactivity actually present in the cigarette itself. This is the presumed mechanism by which polonium in cigarettes is carcinogenic; otherwise they are no more radioactive than bananas.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8850254

While it is a widely considered theory, my attitude on this has always been "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and I have yet to read any studies showing that a lung tumor likely resulted from tobacco-introduced bronchially-concentrated polonium-derived ionizing radiation, and so am skeptical that polonium makes more than a trivial contribution to the (still very large) carcinogenicity of tobacco products.

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/66/1/27.short

Tobaccos from countries with high and low incidences of lung cancer were analyzed. Tobacco concentrations of polonium-210 were similar in cigarettes from high- and low-incidence countries.
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However, see also here: tobacco does cause significant amounts of cancer at bronchial bifurcations:

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7079687

So there is some evidence for this claim.

The mechanism, of course, does not apply to any form of chewed or insufflated tobacco, and so the amount of polonium present in these is likely of no concern. If tobacco were significantly radioactive per se, it would set off Geiger counters, which it does not. Smokers display "only" 30% elevated blood polonium, i.e. two-thirds of polonium exposure is not smoking-related. That fails to explain the massive carcinogenicity of tobacco w.r.t. non-lung cancers.
 
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Psychedelic Jay said:
I’m saying that you can’t prove that weed isn’t killing people based off of any info currently available.

No, I am not ashamed of any drug use.

I am not ignorant either, and nor did I say you were.

I repeat myself because people seem to be coming to a conclusion with no actual base... Most stuff that applies to tobacco also applies to weed.

There is no “years of evidence" because you can’t have evidence with no actual complete study. But, based off common knowledge, smoking anything will lead to lung disease.

My conclusion does have a base. And.... Smoking period kills people. Smoking will not heal you, nor will it improve any aspect of your life besides creativity and what becomes of it...
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According to those charts, marijuana smoke has 8 times the tar of tobacco smoke. However, other studies say that it has 4 time the tar. Other studies say that it has 1/3 the tar of tobacco smoke (.http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml) Which of those studies are true, in your opinion?
 
Psychedelic Jay said:
The lengths of the studies, the potency of the substances in question.... etc.
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I don't get that. What does marijuana's potency have to do with it's tar content? I don't understand what the amount of THC in marijuana is, has to do with the amount of tar that it has.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
I don't get that. What does marijuana's potency have to do with it's tar content? I don't understand what the amount of THC in marijuana is, has to do with the amount of tar that it has.
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Not all marijuana plants are the same, therefore their tar content is not the same. You do realize I've told you this in 3 seperate posts besides this one, right? Which it's no bother to me but the mods might start getting ticked off seeing me repeat myself so much.
 
bloodshed344 said:
Not all marijuana plants are the same, therefore their tar content is not the same. You do realize I've told you this in 3 seperate posts besides this one, right? Which it's no bother to me but the mods might start getting ticked off seeing me repeat myself so much.
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Okay, but what does the potency of the plant have to do with it's tar content? That's my question.

I am asking a different question this time.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
Okay, but what does the potency of the plant have to do with it's tar content? That's my question.

I am asking a different question this time.
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I would assume that THC would degrade into hydrocarbons very similarly to everything else in the plant when completely pyrolized (That's not a real word but I thought it was so hopefully you get my point) but I don't really know the answer to your question. However most of the THC would end up being vaporized and thus would make the user have to deal with much less tar than normal.

I don't have any real statistics to back this up however, but I imagine if you looked at the statistics I would be spot-on.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
According to those charts, marijuana smoke has 8 times the tar of tobacco smoke. However, other studies say that it has 4 time the tar. Other studies say that it has 1/3 the tar of tobacco smoke (.http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml) Which of those studies are true, in your opinion?
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The answer is "all of them", because tar is not a precisely defined term, and what definition is used depends on the precise aim of the research in question. It makes more sense, if the object of concern is carcinogenicity, to compare the levels of specific compounds. However, keep reading.

http://www.ukcia.org/research/ComparisonOfSmoke.pdf

Marijuana has significantly higher levels of compounds which present no carcinogenicity concern, such as ammonia and cyanide, though these are recognizable buzzword chemicals that are often reported in the media. The major nitrosamines are obviously below detection limits in marijuana smoke.

The important table is Table 9: certain of these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as benzo[a]pyrene, are extremely potent carcinogens because their metabolites readily intercalate with DNA and interfere with transcription. A good description of this mechanism is given on the Wikipedia page for benzo[a]pyrene:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene

In general, marijuana seems to be roughly at parity with tobacco on the content of PAHs in mainstream smoke, maybe slightly lower.

Now the caveat: these numbers, as it is commonly reported, are per cigarette. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated, and explains to a great degree the large discrepancy in many studies regarding the content of marijuana smoke. The size of a cigarette is largely standardized; the size of a joint is up to the smoker. In some older studies on cannabis, the size of a cigarette used is... two grams:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac60366a048?journalCode=ancham

Even at my highest rate of usage, I didn't smoke two grams of weed in a week, much less in a single joint. In the study I've linked, the typical size of a cigarette is 0.775 grams.

Note also that the method of smoking influences the content of smoke. In particular, it is suggested that the "extreme" condition applies more to marijuana smoking than tobacco smoking.

This post is a reminder to make sure you understand the methodology of a study, not just the conclusions. This doesn't mean cynically (and uselessly) ignoring a study because it's hard to find people who smoke weed past middle age, either: you have to consider the methodology as it is, not as you'd like it to be, and try to understand what the study means in practice.
 
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