This article is full of insinuations that marijuana is detrimental to public health, yet it provides no citations or references to studies that purport to prove this fallacy. Of course, such studies are out there but they have no credibility in the broader scientific community because everyone with any common sense knows that these results are propaganda, bought and paid for by government funding. In fact, plenty of government funded studies have come to the opposite conclusion, that marijuana is not harmful in any significant way, and these studies are then buried and never see the light of day, nor publication. The Rodgers Report commissioned by the Nixon administration being one famous example.

And what to make of the repeated caricatures of the "pothead" that permeate this article? Why is this written from the perspective of snide cynic instead of treating the subject with the respect it deserves? This article does a disservice to not only the subject but to the truth as well. Pushing the assumption that pot is inherently bad is not going to impress the majority of us who know that it is not.

but frankly I could not care less about pot smokers. It is however ridiculus to expect me to pay for a drug war on citizens exercizing their personal freedom, it is ridiculus to expext me to pay to prosecute people for victimless crimes, it is ridiculus to tax me to support inprisoning my felllow citizens whos only crime is possession of a plant.....

then you better stop breathing...

that made any sense....

My point being that smoking marijuana isn't any more harmful to your lungs than sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway and soaking up the CO. Once again, point me to a study that purports to show chronic marijuana smokers dying of lung cancer! Don't waste your time, they're not out there because marijuana doesn't cause lung cancer. Don't you think the critics of normalization haven't looked into this possibility? Marijuana doesn't contain nicotine or the other hundreds of foreign chemicals that are packed into cigarettes and coincidently there are a number of studies out there that purport to show positive health effects resulting from marijuana use, not to mention the clinical evidence represented by the users of medical marijuana. Of course CO from any type of combustion isn't going to facilitate good health, but there are many other ways of consuming marijuana that don't involve CO production. Even so, we're inundated with CO in the air we breath already and smoking marijuana doesn't add significantly to this preexisting condition.

Is "dying of lung cancer" the only measure of harm from inhaling smoke?

Health Risk - Irrelevant - There is no greater health risk from legal marijuana than illegal marijuana. The opposite is probably true.

"There is no greater health risk from legal marijuana than illegal marijuana."

Oh, well then-- that settles it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm due back on the planet Earth now.

Of course not, and I resent the insinuation that your statement has any relevance to what I was trying to say. So why don't you tell me what your criteria is for measuring the "harm" from inhaling smoke. Are you prepare to quantify this in some way or are you just blowing smoke. Tell me how smoking marijuana is any more harmful to your lungs than breathing automobile exhaust. Please point me to the research that shows marijuana smoking causes significant "harm" even though it doesn't cause cancer. It may be comparable to air pollution but it's certainly not comparable to smoking tobacco.

"I resent the insinuation that your statement has any relevance to what I was trying to say"

They're your words.

"Please point me to the research that shows marijuana smoking causes significant "harm" even though it doesn't cause cancer"

<link>

First, these are not "my words" and you're not only disingenuous but blatantly dishonest in saying so. When you take three words from a sentence out of context and then surround them with your own perverted interpretation of what they mean, you can no longer call them someone else's words. Not honestly at least. Second, your link appears to be another government funded study that got the results it paid for. I look at this study with extreme skepticism and wonder whether what has been identified is actually a disease, based on statements such as... "bullous lung disease can easily go undetected as patients suffering from the disease may show normal chest X-rays and lung functions...chest X-rays and lung functions were normal in half of them." The article never discussed what the actual "harm" from this supposed disease is, beyond "breathing obstruction" which could mean almost anything, nor how many are suffering or have died from it. It looks like more pay-to-play science to me. If this disease causes "eventual destruction of the lungs" then where is the correlation between smoking marijuana and death from the disease. After all, there must be many people that have died this way if it is as destructive as they make it out to be. Where's the proof?

My sincere apologies that this is appears so tedious and confusing.

Let's start over.

You assert this: "smoking marijuana isn't any more harmful to your lungs than sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway and soaking up the CO"

Your proof?

thewolf05827:

My sincere apologies that this is appears so tedious and confusing.

Let's start over.

You assert this: "smoking marijuana isn't any more harmful to your lungs than sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway and soaking up the CO"

Your proof?

duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.......­..........what was the question again?

I don't know that I've ever heard stoned crickets before.

Now, those are my words and they may have been a bit hyperbolic, but if so my excuse is that I'm tired of hearing it assumed marijuana is bad for you when there is no unambiguous evidence to support this proposition. I've seen numerous studies like the one you sited above but those in the past have all faded from view as subsequent studies have consistently refuted them. As a scientist, I know that it's not all that difficult to produce a study that supposedly validates whatever assumptions one wishes to prove. Scientists have no claim to moral superiority and as in any group there are those that put their knowledge to use with a bad intent. Government funding is a powerful motivator, especially when the objective is to justify political policy. I admit that I have no specific clinical studies to cite that will directly prove the assertion that you quote. My motivation here was to induce folks to provide information that would purport to disprove what I was claiming and in doing so I may have gone a little over the top in a few instances. This is more a statement reflecting my attitude and general overall impression of the accumulated research than it is a cold, hard fact, which it may well be but that's not something I'm prepared to prove right now. As far as I know, CO from combustion is the only harmful byproduct of smoking marijuana and I put this "harm" in a relatively benign context. Have you ever gotten a painful headache sitting in a freeway traffic jam? I know I have and years ago I saw a study that claimed this is caused by breathing in CO from all of the surrounding auto exhaust. I believe that this is a larger and more health impacting CO event than one would ever experience smoking marijuana, but that's just my opinion. You realize of course that I asked for proof first, and I do appreciate the link you provided although I do not find it convincing. In the future, please try not to take my words out of context.