> Many have touted smoking marijuana as a safer alternative to cigarettes
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.
And any kind of smoke isn't good for the lungs. I'm tired of people pretending that Marijuana is that wonder drug that's somehow "healthier" than smoking. It's just less unhealthy, which still makes it unhealthy.
Sitting in traffic is unhealthy, eating junk food is unhealthy, living with excessive heat is unhealthy, poverty is unhealthy, too much water is unhealthy.
Lots of things are unhealthy. Some of those are many degrees worse than others, and some only in certain context.
Some things you can actively avoid though. And inhaling smoke on a regular basis is one of them.
I'm particularly sensitive about this topic because I live in a country in which my tax money is used to finance treatment of illnesses that people self inflicted due to smoking.
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
> If a recreational session of marijuana is better for humans than a recreational session of alcohol, then I would actively promote that-
Well it's not: if someone smokes near me, I am smoking with him. Not so with alcohol.
And I’m sure there are those who cringe when they see you but into a sweet for the same reasons. People optimize for lots of things in their life that are not always health, and that’s ok.
Eh, I want to agree with you because smoking is disgusting to me, but honestly in most countries is so heavily taxed these days that smokers are a net fiscal positive, even if the NHS pays for their health care.
What about life expectancy? If smoking makes you die 10 years earlier, that's ~10 years of pension savings for social insurance. Sure, an unlucky few may get lung cancer at 50 and cost a lot of money but most smokers will die, retired, of cheap ailments like COPD or hypertension without fully realizing their social security investment.
Yes, public pensions make smokers even more fiscally positive on expectation.
(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.)
There are neurogenic, anti-tumor, and anti-inflammatory properties and no direct chemical addiction mechanisms as present in nicotine.
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 hear you, but coming from someone that spent about 20 years of his life smoking 4-8 joints per day, who quit smoking to use precise equipment to make filtered vapor at roughly ambient air temperature for the last 5 years, and also who just spent 2 years abstaining completely, you are comparing apples and lasagna.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive. Ask anyone who uses an e-cigarette. Vape liquids typically do not contain MAOIs yet are quite difficult to get off - less than smoking though, likely due to the longer activation duration.
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 did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quitting was a nightmare.
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.
> I did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quitting was a nightmare.
Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain that meant I was now capable of being addicted to the pure nicotine in the ecig that I switched to? I switched entirely to ecigs for two years before quitting.
My brother is still addicted to his ecig despite numerous attempts to titrate down.
> Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain
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.
While permanent changes to a brain are a thing, I don't think being addicted to smoking means you are addicted to drinking so I don't follow the "logic." You're stating that nicotine is not addictive unless you were previously addicted to nicotine in the presence of MAOIs, in which case nicotine on its own is addictive now?
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?
> 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.
It's pretty hard to get addicted to nicotine patches, if you never smoked.
I suspect that if I took up nicotine patches now, years after quitting nicotine (e-cigs), it would be similarly difficult - but not impossible - to get addicted.
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.
as a non smoker, I followed Gwern's micro dosing experiments with nicotine. Small 0.5mg 1/2 tablet doses when doing a task I wanted to reinforce.
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!
As someone who smoked, vaped and quit - nicotine is extremely addictive. Like, by far the most addictive substance I have ever used.
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.
According to who? Certainly going from a 21 mg patch to nothing will give you withdrawal - I know because I tried it.
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.
> 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.
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.
Okay sure, for you, someone who didn't smoke and therefore did not become accustomed (tolerant?) to the immediate effects of a nicotine hit.
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.
Where are the long time studies on vaping? I regularly read news about vaping with new findings on it being unhealthy... Not gonna defend smoking but also not gonna defend any other loser behavior regarding drugs.
Coffee isn't nearly as self destructive as smoking or marijuana. Moderation is key for everything. Unfortunately the alcoholics I know and the weed addicts aren't the biggest fans of moderation. I lost friends to both so yea. Also I can't make people passively consume coffee. People who smoke weed are often extremely inconsiderate on who they affect with that.
In your mind, is every person who drinks an alcoholic? Is every person who consumes cannabis an addict?
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.
What do you think is the harm of vapor that, for instance, begins it's life at 163 degrees, is filtered for particulates through water, and then cooled by flowing through ice and can be as low as 25 degrees depending only on breath speed?
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?
You say "harmless" but I'd rather say "non toxic".
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.
Oh, yes, cannabis does seem to have an effect on people's judgement. Though it might be a bit hard to establish the direction of causality.
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).
Just learn from the lessons drawn from alcohol and tobacco.
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 think in germany you can start to drink at 16 but only very light stuff like cider. What I heard is that when they're 18 and have the legal right to buy vodka they know what not to do with it. In contrast to the usa where you have to wait until being 21, so you manage to get your hands on some at 16 but then it has to be worth it so you take strong stuff and end up with higher problematic consumption rates.
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.
I havent seen anything about frequency in the article. Unless they control for that it doesnt feel like you should claim that weed is somehow safer. Of course you will have less damage from smoking a few joints a day (which would be very heavy use) vs the standart amount of cigarettes a cigarette smoker smokes.
There is a long-standing tradition in cannabis research of confusing the dose.
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.
Is this not a similar argument to condoms / birth control effectiveness? Condoms are 100% effective if used properly and they don’t burst. The failure proportion is primarily misuse. You build in the misuse / other factors into the effectiveness rate.
You'd be surprised about artificial contraception. Sure, when used they can be highly effective to prevent pregnancy, but they also train people to do risky behavior.
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...
I’m not quite sure that was the point I was trying to make… more that the effectiveness figures often have “normal use” and other effects built in.
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.
This is a nonsense slippery slope fallacy, with a healthy side of the naturalism fallacy. Giving people access to contraception is proven over and over again to be the solution to STDs and unwanted pregnancy, and the "natural" methods of abstinence education and the rhythm method prove over and over to be ineffective. (If you have religious convictions such that the rhythm method is the only one acceptable to you, that's fine, live out your convictions, but it is what it is and it's not a prescription for society at large. A friend of mine once told me about going to a rhythm method workshop, taught by someone with 12 kids.)
> 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.
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!
Because people have a right to bodily autonomy. It's not absurd at all. What's absurd is the naturalism fallacy. You could say the same thing about building skyscrapers or treating cancer. Dying of cancer is a natural process of the body, why should anyone disrupt it? Absurd!
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.
> She is also author of Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey across the Life Line and founder of And Then There Were None, an organization that assists abortion-clinic workers seeking to transition out of the industry.
Thanks for quoting some culture warrior clown, but they asked for real sources.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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%.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
> [...] 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.
Well, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad.
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.)
Very common in the UK and Europe where hash was more prevalent than flower until fairly recently. The prevailing wisdom would say not as bad as tobacco, worse than just pure weed, worse than vaping or an alternative method of consumption than combustion.
Tangentially, since moving to edibles to avoid damaging my lungs and hopefully live longer, I've noticed that I don't have cravings for edibles the way I do with smoking flower. Eg, if I smoke one day, then I will feel a craving to smoke for the next week or so. But if I eat edibles one day but not the next, I don't notice any craving.
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.
Cannabis addiction is a dopaminergic response so this makes total sense. The delayed response gratification of the edible onset is enough to break the response activation of dopamine behavioral reward.
I mean, fine. Don't do it then. Few people care if you personally do and if they pressure you, they aren't your friends.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03630...