CT scans show cigarettes are harder on the lungs than marijuana
healthimaging.com
healthimaging.com
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03630...
Wierd take, given that they are completely different drugs, with completely different effects on the brain, with the only similarity being that they are both ingested via smoke.
Lots of things are unhealthy. Some of those are many degrees worse than others, and some only in certain context.
For me, though, some amount of harm is built-in to our condition.
We will eat junk sometimes, we will be sedentary sometimes- we might even overindulge sometimes.
For me, marijuana is recreational, like alcohol.
If a recreational session of marijuana is better for humans than a recreational session of alcohol, then I would actively promote that- since we are all keenly aware of how prohibiting all recreational unhealthy things goes in reality. “Perfect is the enemy of good”, in this case I might say that “perfect is the enemy of improvement”; maybe theres a better quote for exactly this.
Knowing that its better on your lungs than smoking, which was socially acceptable 20 years ago, goes a long way to helping.
Though I also agree with other commenters, its a low bar and the frequency of recreational drug use vs casual smoking is an apples to oranges comparison
It's bad practice to equate an offensive order with drug consumption.
(However in my adopted home we don't have public pensions like that. Your pension pot is yours, and if you keel over, your heirs get it. But smokers are still fiscally positive.
I brought up the NHS as a short-hand for any kind of healthcare system where the general taxpayer foots your medical bill.)
Additionally your statement about "any kind of smoke" while kind of true does not recognize the disproportionate concentration of carcinogens specific to cigarette smoke.
It also misses the disclaimer that nearly as many cannabis users vape and consume edibles (roughly 70%) as do smoke (only 79%) which is certainly better than smoke, even before you add the benefits of water filtration and cooling common for marijuana users.
I'm not saying it's nothing but I'm also not going to pretend it's any worse than, say, living in a wildfire state.
Are you saying that is comparable to a 800 degree ember 4 inches from your mouth?
Is that how you feel about drinking coffee and wine as well, or does it only apply to some other drugs? Is it the same for prescription drugs?
I lost my dad to alcohol and tobacco. The biggest cannabis users in college would often (not aleays) drop out of school. So I am not blind to the downsides of these drugs.
However, I also recognize that there are a zillion people out there that drink alcohol or consume cannabis in moderation, and feel no desire to lump them all into a category of "losers", nor treat them with contempt or disrespect. To each their own.
Any smoke (anything hot, even steam) will cause lung damage. They’re incredibly fragile organs. (biochemist)
Huh? Nicotine ain't addictive either. See https://gwern.net/nicotine for more than you wanted to know.
Just don't smoke. Get your fix (whether nicotine or marijuana) in other ways. Vape or chew gum or use edibles or stick on a nicotine plaster, etc.
Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
Nicotine by itself is at most very lightly addictive.
> Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
I don't think we can draw that conclusion. Just because something helps you get over an addiction doesn't mean it's the addictive part.
Compare and contrast the absolute ineffectiveness of nicotine plasters for getting people off their cigarette habit. (Even though they are a great nicotine delivery mechanism otherwise.)
Similarly, I don't think anyone ever got addicted to nicotine plasters.
I think it's horrible to tell people nicotine is not addictive. Quitting is very difficult.
A quick Google offers plenty of alternative study results.
I personally know people who were addicted to nicotine patches. One reason they are likely not as addictive as smoking is because they take much longer to reach noticeable concentrations in your bloodstream. Vaping also takes longer than smoking but not nearly as long as patches.
Compare this to oral vs IV drug use.
Edit: I will add that while I do strongly believe nicotine is addictive, I also believe smoking is more addictive and that it is primarily all the other chemicals in tobacco smoke that cause most physical harm to the body.
My brother is still addicted to his ecig despite numerous attempts to titrate down.
Yes. Once an addict, always an addict. ('Irreversible changes to a brain' are quite common. You remember having smoked, for example...) More importantly, this was something emphasized before, and so it is irrelevant to bring it up as a supposed counterexample.
I fail to understand how nicotine on its own would satisfy an addictive craving created by a different chemical or combination of chemicals, if it isn't addictive itself.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean about a previously emphasized counterexample either. Could you elaborate?
It's pretty hard to get addicted to nicotine patches, if you never smoked.
I don't see this as an argument that nicotine is not addictive - just that different routes of administration are more or less addictive, similar to IV vs. oral opiate use.
Then I found myself taking a one or two of these 1mg tablets during the day when driving as I want to increase good habits when driving. Then habitually whenever I felt like it, sometimes with a coffee and a book. They were the weakest mg you could get, and there was no direct feeling of their effect. I did feel increasing anxiety which lead to physical symptoms during this time, but the tablets didn't seem to make any direct effect on the anxiety, I didn't take the nicotine to calm down and I didn't connect the two together (its only now writing this comment that I'm thinking they may be connected)
So it was definitely addicting, however, when the box ran out, stopping seemed to be instantaneous and painless. I did quit because I realised I wasnt using it as I wanted to initially and it was becoming a habit. I do remember a couple of times looking for the tablets, checking to see if there wasn't some in the car. mild. The feeling of anxiety is gone now too.
So I'm not sure if I would say I was addicted, but maybe I was. It was certainly habit forming!
Nicotine isn't really absorbed well that way. That's also why Gwern's self experiment didn't really work.
In any case, yes, stimulants can cause anxiety in people. (Weirdly, they can also help with anxiety. The brain is weird.)
When you abstain from nicotine, you will get physical withdrawal symptoms. Nausea, headaches, heart racing, that type of thing. But you'll also get psychological symptoms - paranoia, anxiety, irritability.
I know for a fact it's the nicotine because:
1. Vaping contains a lot of nicotine, too, and it satisfies the craving.
2. You can actually feel the nicotine hitting your blood when you relapse.
3. Nicotine patches remove the withdrawal symptoms.
Nicotine patches aren't perfect, and the reason they might be less addicting is because there's no hit. It's a constant stream of nicotine which ends up feeling like no nicotine at all. Instead, it feels like it's just preventing the affects of a lack of nicotine, i.e. it's inhibiting withdrawal. But it's not giving you the effects of nicotine.
Like when you smoke a cigarette you immediately feel relaxed and happy and it's a very sudden effect. But with nicotine patches since there's no curves you don't get that.
Nope. I never smoked, but tried patches, and I certainly felt the effects. (And I didn't have any withdrawal that I needed to inhibit.) My non-smoking friends who tried had the same experience.
But, as a cessation tool, which is what they are, this has been my experience.
And, I would be hesitant about using nicotine patches or something like Zyn recreationally. Nicotine, even by itself, is harmful to the cardiovascular system over a long period of time.
What kills you is the tar in your lungs (and on the way there, like your throat). And you get that from burning stuff in general.
To illustrate: cannabis will not create gaping holes in your brain like mercury would, but although I'm convinced there are valid reasons to use cannabinoids for medical purposes, I'm also convinced that recreational use (especially at a young age) has a terrible impact on brain development and personnality developpment.
My personal take is that the proportion of people that subjectively enjoy cannabis at the cost of feeling okay with very bad life decisions is high enough to warrant extreme carefulness when decriminalizing it. The typical example is the stoner apathy that turns into amotivational syndrome.
Re reading your comment I see that it was mainly to get this off my chest. Hope you don't mind.
I just meant that the direct damage smoking either plant does to your brain pales in comparison to direct damage the tar causes to your lungs.
> I'm also convinced that recreational use (especially at a young age) has a terrible impact on brain development and personality development.
> [...] high enough to warrant extreme carefulness when decriminalizing it.
I suspect you can get most of the benefits of decriminalizing (like removing a funding source for organised crime) whilst avoiding most of the downside you mention, by slapping on an appropriately high tax on the stuff.
The main limit is that if your tax is too high, it encourages (too much of) a black market. But I'm fairly sure there's a tax that's high enough to keep the consumption of most youngsters and poor people low, whilst still avoiding much of a black market.
I explicitly mention youngsters and poor people, because as conceived the tax is a paternalistic instrument to protect people from themselves. Rich people don't need our protection, they can fend for themselves.
But I'm not sure there's not something better. Notably because a very high tax de facto creates a black market, but even a moderate tax is actually often high enough to create a black market for poor people, which in turn are already the one paying the highest price (health wise) of environnemental diseases (junk food, tobacco, alcohol, not exercising, and cannabis).
Compared to the cost of production, many countries have quite substantial taxes on alcohol and tobacco, but there's generally not that much of a black market for eg beer. (There might be more of a black market for distilled spirits, but those are also taxed more.)
I could imagine benefits of limiting strong cannabis strains until some later age. It also destroys the transgressive nature of the smoking act.
It actually starts at age 14 for some stuff. And if you are with your parents (and not in a restaurant), I think it's up on them to decide, even if you are younger than 14. At least in practice.
Where I grew up, it's a fairly common tradition to let even primary school kids have a sip of Eierlikör (German Egg Liqueur) for New Year's Eve.
Britain has some interesting rules, too. I think their legal drinking age for beer in a pub is lower, if you are also having a meal with your beer.
See: Rodent studies using insane super-doses injected directly with the equivalent of 140 joints+ every day, Marinol vs cannabis, claiming 5% THC cannabis as "high dose" in research, studies citing 'potency increase' as proof of increasing risk without controlling for dose adjustments, driving impairment studies using blood levels as measurement, etc.
It's sort of like giving away free parachutes and plane rides to everyone. Sure, that support will encourage lots of skydiving. But eventually, isn't someone going to go up without a parachute, say "YOLO" and dive out anyway?
The same thing happens with contracepting, promiscuous men and women: they become accustomed to using one another as objects and free, easy access to sex whenever. But when that contraception isn't readily available at hand, they're going ahead anyway. They're going to do it regardless, because it's the habit they're accustomed to now.
So on balance, it's really been found that free access to artificial contraception tends to encourage and increase unplanned/unwanted pregnancies. And that's exactly why it's so plentiful, because the goal is the opposite of what you may think...
Abby Johnson: You can find different studies that say different things. One in Colorado said you give women contraception and abortion rates go down; other studies say that’s not true. What we do know for sure, according to Guttmacher themselves, Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, is that 54% of women who are having abortions are using contraception at the time when they get pregnant. So the idea that contraception is working for women and that it’s preventing abortion is not true. If it were, that number would not be 54%.
> Sex is normal and healthy
So is pregnancy and childbirth. Why administer drugs to disrupt normal, healthy biological processes? Absurd!
Thanks for quoting some culture warrior clown, but they asked for real sources.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that many people seeking abortions are using contraceptives - they didn't want to get pregnant, after all. Contraceptives are reliable but not infallible. Abortion happens everyday in a society of hundreds of millions, but contraceptives failing is rare. It's not really any more surprising than a handful of people getting struck by lightning every year, even if it's more morally and politically charged.
Now come on now.
> But when that contraception isn't readily available at hand, they're going ahead anyway.
They have been doing it anyway since the dawn of time, whether they ever had access to contraception or not. Sex is normal and healthy. The solution is to give them ready access to contraception.
To your point, people were promiscuous before contraception, and we are now in a much better situation unwanted pregnancy / STD wise since its advent. I’m not convinced by the reasoning whatsoever.
My intuition would be that this is due to frequency, since a normal person would smoke weed far less often than they would smoke nicotine, and this is a really important distinction. If frequency is important to this question, then Marijuana smoke is not actually safer, but is just enjoyed more rarely. Maybe the lungs have a chance to clear themselves out and reduce inflammation between marijuana sessions? Just asking about the lifetime impact on users makes no sense since these drugs have totally different usage profiles.
They “reconstitute” tobacco dust and other waste into usable material via binders (“sheet tobacco”), add humectants to keep the tobacco from drying out, preservatives to keep it from oxidizing, shit to enhance the flavor, “puff up” tobacco with a bunch of chemicals so it takes up more volume, and so on. Since the 2000s there’s also compounds similar to flame retardants (!!!) in the wrapping so that the cigarette goes out if you fall asleep, instead of burning your house down. Much of these additions come from reprocessing the waste from previous steps to “minimize waste.”
Marijuana on the other hand is religiously tested for pesticides and other contaminants in most states. However that industry isn’t far behind: a friend loves diamond/oil infused blunts and to me it’s blatantly obvious that they’re using some of the same techniques to repurpose lost terpenes and adding synthetic aromatics that were never tested for combustion.
They're going to a convenience store, or a dive bar that carries the worst stuff and they're going to drink that, day-in, day-out, to excess.
I believe that, if drinkers had access to pure and clean ethanol-based beverages, and also maintained good nutrition and a decent diet, they wouldn't get all this liver failure and horrific metabolic stuff that they suffer as alcoholics. I feel it's often tangential to the substance itself.
When I smoked, I often picked up clove cigarettes. My hairdresser friend with purple hair advised me that the molecules of clove smoke were huge compared to tobacco smoke and I was killing myself that much faster. I thank President Obama for finally closing out the clove cigarette market. I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?
A “fun” experiment to run along those lines is making prison hooch* or using turbo yeast. You can get anywhere from 20-30% ABV in a week or two, but if you drink it immediately it will result in the worst hangover you’ve ever had. It takes months of aging for it to become drinkable.
* The PrisonHooch subreddit is delightful. Who doesn’t want liquor made from Nerds candy or Gatorade?
Btw, distilling already removes most byproducts. (But you might still want to age.) Your comment seems a bit confused about straight up fermented products vs distilling fermented products.
I'm not sure you can get 20%-30% alcohol just from using fermentation. 18% is already a stretch and requires a lot of tricks. But you can get to your 20%-30% easily with some basic distilling equipment.
18% requires a lot of tricks if you’re going the classical EC1118 route* but you can easily get 20% in a week or two from just turbo yeast (although its nigh undrinkable). I haven’t seen many reliable reports of 30% but plenty of 24-26%.
* which IIRC is capable of 21% en extremis
Distillation removes most _kinds_ of byproducts, but leaves some kinds nearly untouched. Eg no sugars come over, but unless really careful you get all kinds of weird other alkanols, like methanol, and other volatile crap.
Filtering can remove that crap, yes.
I didn't know that there are yeasts that are so much more alcohol tolerant. Interesting.
Eh, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad for you. Exactly what kind of plant matter you are burning is mostly a rounding error.
Go and vape, if you want to consume tobacco or marijuana.
They were sued and are not allowed to call the extra clean line organic anymore. Since the Polonium from fertilizer is a problem, you can avoid it there.
Thing is, cigarette filters absorb such large amounts of tar and other nasties that it’s not entirely clear that hand rolled cigarettes can ever be healthier than industrial ones, unless you’re careful to use proper filters every time.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1277837/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0...
The tobacco industry was well-aware of the risk from radioactivity since the 1950s. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/big-tobacco-knew-rad...
Better comparison may be tobacco smoked in pipe but inhaled in same way as weed, and weed. But nobody smokes pipes like that.
You might be right about average user being less, but there are still enough people who use it all the time that i would expect negative effects to show up in them, if it was only about frequency of use. Like the top 1% of canabis smokers probably smokes as much as the average cigarette smoker, so if its just about dose we should still see it.
According to an expert, it's 32 joints or so a day[0], although that may be slightly hyperbolic?
Nobody smokes nicotine. People smoke tobacco. And it's that very smoke that's bad for you.
Just don't inhale smoke (whether marijuana or tobacco). You can vape or take edibles or use a nicotine plaster or chew a gum, etc. Compared to those alternatives, whether you set fire to marijuana or tobacco or toilet paper is pretty much a rounding error.
The difference between vaping and smoking dwarfs the relative rounding error between tobacco vs marijuana in terms of direct health effects.
(There are indirect health effects, of course. Marijuana is more likely to give you the munchies. Tobacco is more likely to help you with weight loss, if anything.)
My hypothesis is that it's similar to cigarettes where the nicotine is much more addictive in combination with MAOIs in the cigarette. I don't know that MAOIs are the culprit here, I haven't looked into it. And this could be idiosyncratic to me, of course.
Just another reason not to smoke. The cannabis industry in my state has perfected gummies and driven the price down to the point it's not much more expensive than smoking, even with my really high tolerance, and the dispensary will deliver them to my house, so I'm all out of excuses.
This sort of thing really isn't about giving anyone comfort. It is an attempt to learn so folks can use them to understand the world better and the ways our bodies interact with it. It might result in harm reduction in other people, which benefits society in general.
No one is impressed.