Sad. We need to move away from smoking, not encourage this cancer-causing good-for-nothing behavior. Not to mention it causes streets to smell like a skunk.
That being said Europe smokes a lot of weed already, making it legal will help with a lot of side effects of drug traffics. I just hope they use proper pedagogy and support: for well balanced, educated and healthy individuals it's a really good tool, for other people it can be a social/professional death sentence (like alcohol)
> Not to mention it causes streets to smell like a skunk
I'm not sure they'll make it legal to smoke outdoors. In many countries alcohol is legal but drinking in the streets isn't for example.
The person you're replying too is clearly just spreading FUD and probably has never partaken in their live - sad!
We know that just inhaling smoke from a wood fueled stove will increase lung cancer risk. What would be unique with Marijuana that makes their imperfectly burned plant particulates more safe than any other imperfectly burned plant matter?
The CDC view is also that all smoke from burning things is harmful to the lungs and can cause cancer, regardless of what is being burned. People with lung damage is strongly recommended to avoid getting into contact with smoke, including smoking Marijuana.
How can it not increase the chance of cancer (even if to a lesser degree) if you smoked as many joints as some people smoke cigarettes per day (of course you'd have other problems if you tried that)?
BUT we can probably agree it's a generally good thing to focus on bigger problems before smaller ones.
It seems whether or not marijuana causes cancer is an open question: https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/marijuana...
> Whether smoking marijuana causes lung cancer, as cigarette smoking does, remains an open question.67,70 Marijuana smoke contains carcinogenic combustion products, including about 50% more benzoprene and 75% more benzanthracene (and more phenols, vinyl chlorides, nitrosamines, reactive oxygen species) than cigarette smoke.67 Because of how it is typically smoked (deeper inhale, held for longer), marijuana smoking leads to four times the deposition of tar compared to cigarette smoking.71 However, while a few small, uncontrolled studies have suggested that heavy, regular marijuana smoking could increase risk for respiratory cancers, well-designed population studies have failed to find an increased risk of lung cancer associated with marijuana use
Meanwhile, alcohol kills 74,000 people each year in Germany https://movendi.ngo/news/2019/04/18/study-germany-has-an-alc... and costs the country 40,000,000 euro for healthcare costs.
Yet a cursory look at your comment and submission history finds nothing on the topic of this (compared to weed) HUGE killer in Germany. Maybe you're taking up the fight somewhere else, but I think, just like I'm not going to finish this comment and get right back to work, you probably are laser-focusing on this objectively minor health issue (weed usage) for whatever reason, perhaps reefer-madness propaganda? I'm not sure, I'm curious why you think it's an issue compared to something like alcohol, that actually kills lots of people in Germany (I couldn't find any statistics tracking how many people are killed each year in relation to weed in Germany, but my understanding of the drug is that the number should be 0 in terms of actual overdose).
There are a multitude of other methods of consuming cannabis.
If Germany was only planning to legalize edibles, oils etc. it would be a different matter.
Not that I care that much about the smell. And increased cancer risk shouldn't be that high either unless you start smoking weed every day.