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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"It would just make them have to be better."

The best weed on the market is already close to being as good as it's going to get. The real trick is going to be establishing brands with reasonably consistent quality. Right now even if you only go to the dispensaries with the highest Yelp ratings, it's still hit or miss on any given strain.

What I think you will see though is that people who smoke Philip Morris weed will start getting cancer, in the same way that smoking didn't cause cancer until PM starting making cigarettes. (Because of all the chemicals, the filters, and the fact that they're grown in radioactive soil w/ fertilizers that bind to uranium.)

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...smoking didn't cause cancer until PM starting making cigarettes...

I would be very surprised to find out this is true. Do you have a citation?

I'm sure there are better sources, but here is the first one I could find from Wikipedia:

http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/64/1/4

Also, about the uranium, the typical smoker gets the equivalent of 300 chest x-rays per year from smoking American cigarettes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html

Which probably explains why even today smokers in countries that don't use American cigarettes don't have anywhere near the same increase in lung cancer risk.

This really seems to fall into the "if this were really true, why haven't I heard of it until now?" category. There's an awful lot of people who could make an awful lot of money if they could prove that non-American cigarettes don't give you cancer.

None of those articles you provided state "American Cigarettes increase lung cancer risks more than Non-American Cigarettes" - Where are you getting this from?

Also, the equivalent of 300 chest x-rays is based on 'pack-and-a-half' smokers not typical smokers and it doesn't say anywhere specifically from American cigarettes. This is also based on a lifetime consumption I believe.

When I say American cigarettes are more dangerous, what I really mean is that cigarettes are more dangerous than other forms of tobacco consumption, and American tobacco is more dangerous than other tobacco.

For example, the levels of CEA (a cancer marker) in daily hookah smokers are so much lower than the CEA levels is cigarette smokers that they're actually statistically indistinguishable from non-smokers. Similarly, countries who don't grow tobacco in the same fields year after year using phosphate fertilizer have vastly less radioactive material in their tobacco.

http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/5/1/19

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/sources/tobacco.html#footnote

The research on what about smoking actually causes cancer isn't very good yet, but if you combine the research that has been done with the data that shows the different points in history where lung cancer rates vastly increased or decreased, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture. For example, according to wikipedia, "From the 1950s, the incidence of lung adenocarcinoma started to rise relative to other types of lung cancer.[135] This is partly due to the introduction of filter cigarettes. The use of filters removes larger particles from tobacco smoke, thus reducing deposition in larger airways. However the smoker has to inhale more deeply to receive the same amount of nicotine, increasing particle deposition in small airways where adenocarcinoma tends to arise."

Again, there is no safe form of smoking, but all evidence points to the fact that smoking cigarettes made from American tobacco is vastly more dangerous than the ways in which people have used tobacco historically.

the CEA levels of hookah smokers is very interesting.

Do all American tobacco farms use phosphate fertilizers and other countries don't?

You're saying the fact that smoking causes cancer is unrelated to the fact that chewing tobacco also causes cancer?

Inhaling any burned plant material causes a slight increase in (primarily lung) cancer risk.

Inhaling burned tobacco has an above average ability to cause cancer.

Common commercial cigarettes, in general, have other ingredients that become carcinogenic when burned.

Nicotine, while not directly cancer causing, depresses the immune response in the affected areas, increasing cancer risk in those areas. This also affects chew, gum, inhalers, etc. Due to the nature of the rapid regeneration of the mouth and throat, this is likely a significant factor in the increased caused risk for chewed tobacco.

Additionally, chewed tobacco can cause Leukoplakia, which increases the risk of Oral cancer.

Cancer risk (most to least): Smoking, chew/dip, inhalers, gum, snuff.

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