Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I never see anyone describe just why Marijuana is less harmful than cigarettes (or apparently e-cigarettes) and it drives me up the wall.

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.

View on HN

Tobacco absorbs and concentrates radioactive metals in soil and fertilizers. Cannabis does not do this. https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/data-research/facts-sta...

The tobacco industry was well-aware of the risk from radioactivity since the 1950s. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/big-tobacco-knew-rad...

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of this, and this definitely aligns with the findings in the article.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm fairly sure that when you put _smoke_ in your lungs, radioactivity is the least of your worries.

My understanding is that inhaling polonium is one of the main vectors of lung cancer in tobacco smokers. Smoke inhalation is bad, afaik it's the main way people die in structure fires, smoke has carbon monoxide and formaldehyde and all sorts of bad stuff, but tobacco is particularly deadly, and afaik polonium from the fertilizer is a big part of why that is.

There was research on that, low or heavy marijuana use makes no difference. It just doesn't cause cancer, that's pretty much established fact at this point. There were substances in THC found that kill cancer cells, so whatever negative effects it does have (marijuana has 4 times as much tar than cigarettes) seem to be cancelled out.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1277837/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0...

Sorry but any kind of smoke in your lungs causes cancer. Marijuana smokers have this bad habit of claiming 0 downsides to their favorite drug just because it was historically demonized. Be honest about the cons.

And yet they're the person who linked to a study supporting their claim, while you didn't. It's easy to believe your claim, but without evidence it's also easy to believe theirs. Posting your personal assumption isn't helping the argument on either side.

Linking a study doesnt make his claim any more credible. I could link you studies claiming all sorts of things.

It makes it more credible than a claim without any supporting evidence.

The answer is industrial processing. Inhaling combustants is bad no matter the plant matter but the tobacco industry has over a century of experience in optimizing their product which leads to a lot of nasty chemicals that have been grandfathered in as a historical accident.

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.

I feel like the harms of alcohol are also magnified by adulterants here. For example, an alcoholic will often choose dirt-cheap beer or spirits to consume on the regular. Is that stuff pure and clean? No. There is no requirement to label ingredients in a bottle of wine, beer, or vodka. You can put any old stuff in there as long as you're not outright poisoning people.

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?

In that case they’re not adulterants but natural byproducts of fermentation. That’s why most liquors are aged, to give the chemical reactions time to eliminate those byproducts (like trace amounts of methanol from fermented pectin).

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?

NileRed (on YouTube) made alcohol from toilet paper to show what's possible.

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.

Distillation removes most byproducts but not enough to really matter. Their boiling points aren’t different enough and like with ethanol, distillation concentrates the bad stuff. It depends on the fermentation source but even vodka becomes significantly more drinkable when properly filtered.

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

Agreed.

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.

> 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?

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.

> I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?

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.

I would understand this to mean that natural cigarettes (just some tobacco in paper) would be much healthier. However, I don't think this is true either. I hear you regarding the shocking and astoundingly bad chemicals added to the process, but my impression is that any kind of smoke is also quite bad for you. (as an aside, we're cursed with flame retardant chemicals in our couches and mattresses because people are too stupid not to fall asleep while smoking)

Yes and no. There is some statistical evidence that American Spirits are “healthier” than Marlboros and Camels and whatnot, because they don’t do the same level of industrial processing. That applies to their loose tobacco too.

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.

So according to https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica... about 29% of male uses use canabis 5-6 times a week. Presumably the top 5% smoke canabis even more.

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.

I think their point isn't the number of people, but that a heavy weed smoker might maybe run through a few joints in a day while cigarette smokers might run through a couple dozen.

Still, the negative effect of smoking shows up in the couple a day case. If it was just dose it would show up for those weed smokers.

>I think their point isn't the number of people, but that a heavy weed smoker might maybe run through a few joints in a day while cigarette smokers might run through a couple dozen.

According to an expert, it's 32 joints or so a day[0], although that may be slightly hyperbolic?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUYUkrwjEt4

> [...] would smoke weed far less often than they would smoke nicotine, [...]

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.

Smoke tobacco bought in a package, and smoke just tobacco from cigarettes. Apart from cigarettes one being absolutely disgusting, it feels like there is something extra. I'd expect some addiction-enhancing stuff that also increases cancer rates, on top of that paper which is also carcinogenic to smoke.

Better comparison may be tobacco smoked in pipe but inhaled in same way as weed, and weed. But nobody smokes pipes like that.

The fire safe cigarettes that have been mandated in the USA over a decade now have even more nasty stuff added to the paper to make the cigarette go out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com