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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. I'm all for legalization, but the public discourse has skewed the risk perception of it. OK, it may not be as bas as alcohol, but that certainly doesn't make it harmless.

For people who have access, I highly recommend this review article from June 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most respected scientific medical publication in the world, which goes over the published scientific litterature about Marijuana: bottom line, it's not as innofensive as some make it to be, and adolescents are most at risk. Caveat Emptor.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1402309

(personally, I do believe it should be legalized for policy and social reasons, but that doesn't mean I think it's biologically harmless)

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The problem is: the USG prevents research in the area. It is extremely hard to get permission from the DEA to research the effects of MJ.

I don't believe anyone is claiming that MJ is harmless; but that overall, MJ's harm is lesser than the harm caused by alcohol or tobacco. Teens are already known to be more susceptible to chemical substances because of their developing brains, so this study doesn't seem to be very surprising.

Is that actually true in the past decade, or is it, like, true, man?

(We should end cannabis prohibition, and are obviously in the process of doing that, but I'm having no trouble turning up tons of recent cannabis research studies.)

> tobacco

Why would cannabis be less harmful than tobacco? The smoke from each is roughly the same, with the obvious differences being nicotine in tobacco and cannbinoids in cannabis.

Maybe cannabis smokers smoke less frequently than cigarette smokers; but maybe they inhale the smoke deeper and hold it longer.

It's a bit frustrating that anyone who expresses any concern about cannabis is written off as a propagandist of an oppressive government.

(I'm pro legalisation)

Because most people don't put rat poison in their joints?

The comparison I've heard is that a regularly smoking 1 joint a day is roughly equivalent to smoking 1 self-rolled cigarette using tobacco grown without additives.

>>Because most people don't put rat poison in their joints?

Correct. Unless you include users who mix in other substances to increase the efficacy of the cannabis they are smoking.

I've had friends mix everything from coke, meth, crushed barbiturates and yes even tobacco in with their cannabis.

Ummm... I don't know how to break this to you dude, but your friends aren't mixing in coke and meth to make the effects of the pot stronger.

They're mixing coke and meth in to smoke coke and meth.

Smoke for smoke, cannabis and tobacco are probably equally harmful. It's the combustion of plant matter and the inhalation of smoke, not the nicotine per se, that makes tobacco so harmful. The same applies for smoked cannabis, and indeed, some studies have found cannabis smoke slightly more harmful in that regard, in so far as cannabis isn't usually smoked with a filter.

But unlike tobacco, cannabis does not contain a chemical as highly addictive as nicotine. Your average tobacco smoker probably smokes an order of magnitude more tobacco than your average cannabis smoker smokes cannabis. Evidently there is a nonzero risk of physical or psychological dependency for marijuana, but it's nowhere near the risk profile of tobacco.

    > Smoke for smoke, cannabis and tobacco are probably
    > equally harmful.

I feel like you're disagreeing with the article.

If you smoke heavily from 14 and quit at 18, your health risks from tobacco will normalise to that of a non-smoker after x years, but there's a suggestion here that if it's cannabis you're smoking, you've caused yourself irreparable harm

Even that is going to be less of an issue going forward- more and more people are using vaporizers rather than inhaling smoke from burning plants.

There are two primary sources of damage from inhaled tobacco smoke.

The smoke itself is made up of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons like anthracene. These molecules are carcinogenic on their own, and activate the bodies' inflammation response causing additional damage. In this regard, both marijuana and tobacco will have very similar detrimental effects. However, some of the compounds found in marijuana, like cannabidiol, are anti-inflammatory agents (targeting the CB2 receptor), which helps prevent some of the damage that would otherwise be caused by the smoke (but not all of it).

The other source of damage is radioisotopes absorbed from the soil. The tobacco plant tends to absorb radioactive elements like polonium more readily than many other plants. These radioisotopes are deposited on the lining of the lungs, where they undergo decay, causing cellular damage. Marijuana may or may not be similar to tobacco in this respect, but I have not done much research on that.

> Marijuana may or may not be similar to tobacco in this respect, but I have not done much research on that.

This isn't going to be a significant issue if it's grown indoors. Also, a large part of the reason why tobacco has a lot of radiation is because of the fertilizer that sticks to the leaves, whereas this isn't an issue with cannabis because it's not being fertilized by crop dusters.

Cannabis is less harmful than tobacco because it can be ingested or vaporized. There are no Tobacco Brownies or candies.

http://www.redlinepharmacy.com/compounding-services/nicotine...

E-cigarettes essentially vaporize nicotine. Hookah smoking is also pretty much a form of tobacco vaporization.

> Maybe cannabis smokers smoke less frequently than cigarette smokers; but maybe they inhale the smoke deeper and hold it longer.

I'm guessing it's probably because you don't have to smoke as much as tobacco.

Also, anecdotally: I have yet to hear of someone getting lung cancer from smoking pot. Heck, Willie Nelson has been toking up for decades, and apparently his lungs are just fine.

And then there's this: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/cannabis/healthpr...

> It's a bit frustrating that anyone who expresses any concern about cannabis is written off as a propagandist of an oppressive government.

That was not needed.

Don't forget that smokeless tobacco causes cancer as well, so there's something other than combustion going on. I've also seen studies that show marijuana use by itself (without also smoking tobacco) doesn't significantly increase lung cancer rates.

http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20060523/pot-smoki...

http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/health-and-fitness/53910-...

So my issue with this is that there are numerous counter examples that come readily to mind. I understand that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that naming random exceptions is generally a poor form of argument.

But, Barack Obama was in the "Choom Gang" when he was in high school, which roughly translates to the "Marijuana Gang". Think about that: The current leader of the free world smoked so much as a teenager that he and his friends named their group after the drug itself.

The last three US presidents have said that they smoked marijuana as teenagers and college students. Carl Sagan was a big proponent, and there are many other successful people in the worlds of politics, science and business who smoked pot casually at the least. If it does change the structure of the brain and impair long term memory, what exactly does that mean? Whatever the effect, it apparently doesn't disqualify people from being among the most intelligent and successful in the world.

Brain studies are useful, but we should be cautious when using them to draw sweeping conclusions about social policy.

Plenty of successful people drank Alcohol when they were younger but that doesn't mean we can just ignore the ill effects of alcohol.

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