January 18th, 2012 
admin Smoking a joint from time to time won’t damage the lungs, even after years of drug use, according to a study led by UCSF researchers that disproves one of the major concerns about marijuana – that smoking it must be just as risky as lighting up a cigarette.
The study, results of which were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the lung capacity of people who smoked marijuana was not diminished by regular toking, even among those who smoked once or twice a week.
Smoking cigarettes has such dramatic, long-term health consequences – including emphysema and lung cancer – that doctors have long assumed that marijuana smoking, too, must be detrimental.
Heavy marijuana use may indeed turn out to be just as risky as cigarette smoking, but that will be tough to prove because so few people smoke as much pot as they do tobacco. And not all scientists are convinced that marijuana smoke is actually as deadly as cigarette smoke.
For occasional users, smoking marijuana was actually associated with a small but statistically significant increase in lung capacity, according to the UCSF study. That increase wouldn’t be noticeable to the individual – and certainly shouldn’t be interpreted as a beneficial effect of smoking marijuana, scientists added – but it may be related to the deep breathing pot smokers use to draw the drug into their lungs.
The study looked at 5,115 men and women over a 20-year period, starting in 1985, who were part of a national clinical trial meant to look at heart disease risk in young adults. The smoking researchers used data collected on tobacco and marijuana use, along with regular tests of pulmonary function.
Pot and cigarettes.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Published: Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Copyright: 2012 San Francisco Chronicle
