Healthy Pot Smokers
I don’t understand why this headline would come as surprise to anyone: Pot’s Low Cancer Risk a Surprise Finding. I mean, isn’t it pretty obvious why pot smokers would be at less of a cancer risk? Apparently not…
The findings are a surprise because marijuana smoke has some of the same cancer-causing substances as tobacco smoke, often in higher concentrations, said the senior researcher, Donald Tashkin, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California-Los Angeles.One possible explanation is that THC, a key ingredient in marijuana not present in tobacco, may inhibit tumor growth, he said in an interview.
Here’s another possible explanation: Pot smokers don’t smoke pot the same way cigarette smoke tobacco. Pot heads don’t walk into taverns, toss packs of joints on bars, and then sit there for three or four hours, drinking and chain-smoking pot cigarettes. For a pot smoker, pot smoke is a means to the end—and the end, of course, is getting high. The point isn’t to sit there inhaling and exhaling pot smoke all night long. No one chain-smokes joints. With pot, you take three or four puffs, you’re high, you’re done. Put the pot away and break out the chips and salsa. (Or, in my case, a box of See’s Candies.)
Contrast pot smokers to cigarette smokers: For most cigarette smokers, smoking is the point. It’s the means and the end. Cigarette smokers smoke to smoke. Smoking passes the time, gives them something to do with their hands, or make `em look, er, cool. In, out, in out, one cigarette after another. Smoke, smoke, smoke. Some smoke to maintain the feeble buzz tobacco cigarettes provide, or to depress their appetites, or to briefly sate their nicotine cravings. But these pharmacological “benefits” are brief, so cigarette smokers keep lighting up, again and again, and smoke and smoke and smoke some more.
So when anti-pot scare-mongers write things like, “…one marijuana cigarette can deliver four times as much cancer-causing tar as one tobacco cigarette,” all they’re proving is that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. One marijuana cigarette may very well deliver four times as much cancer-causing tar as one tobacco cigarette, but a casual pot smokers will smoke one or two joints a month, not one, two, or three packs in a day. Which means they inhale far less more smoke, are exposed to far fewer carcinogens, and are therefore at lower risk of contracting lung, mouth, or throat cancer.
Hello, Professor Tashkin? Like, duh?
And not only do pot smokers inhale far less smoke than cigarette smokers, today’s pot smokers can get high smoking far less pot than pot smokers did in previous decades. Don’t take my word for it—here’s what the same scaremonger had to say:
Marijuana today is more than twice as powerful on average as it was 20 years ago. It contains twice the concentration of THC, the chemical that affects the brain.
Yup, it sure does. It’s a point that anti-pot scaremongers can’t resist hammering away at. When U.S. Drug Czar John Walters hosted an installment of “Ask the Whitehouse,” a regular live web chat with not-yet-indicted Bush administration officials, Walters delivered this urgent warning to Peter from Bloomington: “Today’s marijuana is also twice as strong as it was in the mid 80’s.”
Psst? Peter from Bloomington? Just between you and me, it’s a good thing that today’s marijuana is twice as strong as it was in the mid 80s. If you’re lucky enough to be smoking pot in 2005 and not 1985, you can smoke half as much pot and get just as high! Isn’t that great! Instead of bitching about this happy development the federal government should be thanking modern pot farmers for cutting in half the amount of smoke pot users are exposed to on our way to getting high.
Hm. Now where were those chips?
You may also want to throw in the fact that pot isn't intentionally laced with hundred of deadly & addictive chemicals, like tobacco is. Now, those same scaremongers may dredge up the urban myths of "this one guy, in the 70's, got ahold of this pot that was laced with PCP, and then jumped out of a window..." and so on. No modern pot grower adds anything to their plants other than fertilizer: why taint your product? 30+ years ago, you laced ditch-weed because it had almost no THC. Today's stuff needs no such masking or enhancing. (It also shouldn't be wrapped in paper! Please, use some glass and clean water! Don't believe the scaremongers who say it doesn't filter anything: look at the water when you're done and draw your own conclusions.)