Tobacco or Marijuana?

[Kryzzler]

Obviously smoking poses risks to lung-health, but which is worst for you? Tobacco or marijuana? I've heard people claim both sides and can't seem to find a definitive and reliable answer anywhere. Abovetheinfluence.com claims marijuana contains 50-70% more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than tobacco but when I checked their source I couldn't find that figure, or any figure for that matter. Does anyone have any good studies or reliable sources they can point me to?

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Current mainstream medical opinion from UpToDate.com, a subscription website for medical professionals:

Marijuana — The carcinogenicity of marijuana smoking is less studied than that of tobacco smoking. Several reports have documented histologic and molecular changes in the bronchial epithelium of marijuana smokers that are similar to the metaplastic premalignant alterations that are seen among tobacco smokers. However, an association between marijuana smoking and lung cancer has been difficult to prove because studies were limited by selection bias, small sample size, and failure to adjust for tobacco smoking. In addition, the duration from the onset of marijuana smoking to outcome (ie, lung cancer) measurement may have been insufficient for lung cancer to develop because young participants were enrolled in most studies. (See "Pulmonary complications of cocaine abuse".)

Users of these drugs are probably at increased risk for lung cancer, although the magnitude of risk has not been well quantified. The absolute risk of lung cancer that a given individual accrues likely relates to the magnitude and duration of drug use, the amount of adulterants coingested, and whether exposure to concomitant carcinogens (such as tobacco smoke) is present. In a case-control study, the risk of lung cancer increased 8 percent for each joint-year of marijuana smoking after adjusting for cigarette smoking. In comparison, the risk of lung cancer increased 7 percent for each pack-year of cigarette smoking after adjusting for marijuana smoking.

[Son of a Rich]

I've heard there's cyanide in apple peels. Which is worse, eating apples or going to the gas chamber?

[pulykamell]

Originally Posted by Qadgop the Mercotan

Current mainstream medical opinion from UpToDate.com, a subscription website for medical professionals:

Wait, am I reading that correctly? Is that saying that the studies show that a joint a day is slightly worse for your lungs than a pack a day?

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Originally Posted by pulykamell

Wait, am I reading that correctly? Is that saying that the studies show that a joint a day is slightly worse for your lungs than a pack a day?

About as risky, per the study.

Here's the PubMed abstract of the paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=18238947

Basically, in this one fairly well constructed study, a joint a day of pot and a pack a day of tobacco seemed equivalently risky as far as the development of lung cancer was concerned.

Again, this field of study suffers from lack of good research to tease out the particulars.

So if this risk ratio is true, it suggests that 20 pack/years of tobacco (which is the generally accepted threshold for entering cancer country) seems equate to 20 joint/years for pot. (a pack year = 1 PPD/year or 2 PPD/6 months or 1/2 PPD for 2 years etc. while a joint year is a joint a day for a year or two for 6 months, etc.)

Again, the data is nowhere near as good as what we have on tobacco alone.

[Yorikke]

Never mind. Didn't fully read the OP.

[thelurkinghorror]

Recent studies show that mild marijuana use improves lung function (and if you don't like the Sun, there's a cite in there). Note that it doesn't say anything about cancer rates.

And of course, tobacco are primarily inhaled through one form, cigarettes (plus cigars, pipes). Whereas most people don't necessarily use joints, but pipes, bongs, etc. at home. Whether it's true, "they" say those forms are cleaner because the smoke is captured.

[Jeff Lichtman]

When considering which is worse, you may want to take into account how the products are typically used. Very few marijuana smokers have the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit.

[typoink]

Originally Posted by thelurkinghorror

And of course, tobacco are primarily inhaled through one form, cigarettes (plus cigars, pipes). Whereas most people don't necessarily use joints, but pipes, bongs, etc. at home. Whether it's true, "they" say those forms are cleaner because the smoke is captured.

The biggest outlier there being vaporizers, which are increasingly popular. I'd wager a LARGE minority if not an outright majority of frequent pot smokers over the age of, say, 25 use vaporizers.

[Hari Seldon]

Originally Posted by Son of a Rich

I've heard there's cyanide in apple peels. Which is worse, eating apples or going to the gas chamber?

I don't know about the peel, but there is definitely cyanide in the apple seed, as well as pear seeds and the pits of peaches, apricots, cherries, probably all the prunuses, except that it has been bred out of the almond (an occasional throwback excepted--that gets you a bitter almond). On the other hand cyanide gets eliminated rather quickly. I have read that eating a cup of apple seeds would kill you, but the seeds of one apple are harmless. I assume that you have to chew the seed to release the poison since the "purpose" of the seed is to go through you intact and be eliminated somewhere else.

Now getting back to the OP, I think most pot, if smoked, is smoked by taking some tobacco out of a cigarette and replacing it by the pot. So that would be a very confounding problem. If you don't smoke it (someone I knew made "hash" brownies) then there is no reason it would contribute to lung cancer, not to say that it might not have other serious effects. In fact, lung cancer might not be the worst effect of smoking; it might be heart disease. Whether caused by the nicotine, by the monoxide released during smoking or something else, I know not.

[Jaledin]

Originally Posted by typoink

The biggest outlier there being vaporizers, which are increasingly popular. I'd wager a LARGE minority if not an outright majority of frequent pot smokers over the age of, say, 25 use vaporizers.

I was going to say, "Both!," but then I read the OP. Interesting.

I really don't think many people use vaporizers -- all of my friends are over twenty-five and everyone I know IRL, basically, smokes weed at least occasionally. I've been trying to get some older friends (over fifty) who use many times daily to get into vaporizers, but old habits die hard, I guess.

Surprising results. One lousy joint, even if shared among at least one other person, is really that bad for you. Besides. Coughing actually gets you higher.

[Alan Smithee]

Originally Posted by typoink

The biggest outlier there being vaporizers, which are increasingly popular. I'd wager a LARGE minority if not an outright majority of frequent pot smokers over the age of, say, 25 use vaporizers.

Most of my friends are over 35, most of them use pot, and none of them use a vaporizer.

Originally Posted by Hari Seldon

Now getting back to the OP, I think most pot, if smoked, is smoked by taking some tobacco out of a cigarette and replacing it by the pot. So that would be a very confounding problem.

Untrue. I've heard that mixing hash with tobacco is (or used to be) common in the UK (and possibly other parts of Europe) but I don't think anyone smokes that way in the US. Closest would be a blunt, made by emptying all the tobacco filler from a cheap cigar and using the tobacco wrapper to hold the weed. That's the only way I've ever heard of people smoking marijuana with tobacco here, and it's a pretty low proportion of tobacco.

[DrDeth]

Well, there aren;t many "two pack a day for 20 year" marijuana smokers as Jeff Lichtman sez, , and I'd guess if there was one he'd be too mellow even to care about lung cancer.

In general, moderate marijuana use seems to have no significant medical problems for most people. If you smoke only one joint or two on the weekends, you're likely not doing yourself much harm.

OTOH, those tobacco users that smoke* one cigar a day aren't exactly courting death either. Unless you have one of those "walking stick" sized cigars Mark Twain wrote about.

The problem being- tobacco, (esp when inhaled) is very addictive, and few cig smokers are "casual". Marijuana does not seem to be addictive (again, those few "I smoke two joints in the morning..." users may indeed have a monkey on their back, but they are very rare).

* assuming they don't inhale. "Real" cigar smokers don't inhale, but the dudes that smoke those little flavored cigarillos often do.

[thelurkinghorror]

Originally Posted by typoink

The biggest outlier there being vaporizers, which are increasingly popular. I'd wager a LARGE minority if not an outright majority of frequent pot smokers over the age of, say, 25 use vaporizers.

What fancy pants people have you been hanging out with? I only know of one person who has one, and I'll guess it is not the majority of his usage although I can't say for sure. Most people I know seem to use pipes, and joints are mainly for concerts, camping, fishing, or traveling. Bongs are sometimes broken out for parties but not very portable.

[typoink]

Originally Posted by thelurkinghorror

What fancy pants people have you been hanging out with? I only know of one person who has one, and I'll guess it is not the majority of his usage although I can't say for sure. Most people I know seem to use pipes, and joints are mainly for concerts, camping, fishing, or traveling. Bongs are sometimes broken out for parties but not very portable.

Well, I guess I'm overstating (duh). Traditional methods are still way more popular, but it seems like vaporizers are increasingly in popularity really quickly. Head shops seem to carry a bunch of em now, and they're getting cheaper and (I hear) better.

[Jaledin]

Re Hari's idea with the tobacconug -- I've only seen (or, er, done) it in stealth situs. I used to solo stealth smoke in the park blocks of PDX by the same method -- it works, and when you're done, you've got a little cigarette to smoke to chill out.

Only people in US I've seen genuinely mixing tobacco with weed were Europeans trying to seem continental in the big city and grab some trim in the process. Blunts excepted. Don't know why more people don't use the blunts anymore -- it makes a phat joint.

[SciFiSam]

Originally Posted by Alan Smithee

Most of my friends are over 35, most of them use pot, and none of them use a vaporizer.

Untrue. I've heard that mixing hash with tobacco is (or used to be) common in the UK (and possibly other parts of Europe) but I don't think anyone smokes that way in the US. Closest would be a blunt, made by emptying all the tobacco filler from a cheap cigar and using the tobacco wrapper to hold the weed. That's the only way I've ever heard of people smoking marijuana with tobacco here, and it's a pretty low proportion of tobacco.

I'm similar - I don't use pot, because I don't like it (I tried to for a few years, off and on, and gave up many years ago), but it's very common among my friends. Vaoporizers - I assume you mean bongs? - are rare but not unknown. For the regular dopers (heh) they don't use those, they just smoke it.

And they smoke it often with some tobacco rolled in. I am in the UK - do you mean that, in the US, people, mostly smoke pure marijuana? People here don't empty out a cigar or whatever, they just have rolling tobacco as well as marijuana.

[Ethilrist]

Originally Posted by DrDeth

Well, there aren;t many "two pack a day for 20 year" marijuana smokers as Jeff Lichtman sez, , and I'd guess if there was one he'd be too mellow even to care about lung cancer.

Guys, take another look at what Qadgop said in post #5: One joint a day is equal to one pack of tobacco, not 20 joints. If somebody smokes one joint a day, they're at roughly the same risk as a one-pack-a-day tobacco smoker. People who smoke two or three joints a day are at two or three times the risk.

[Alan Smithee]

Originally Posted by SciFiSam

I'm similar - I don't use pot, because I don't like it (I tried to for a few years, off and on, and gave up many years ago), but it's very common among my friends. Vaoporizers - I assume you mean bongs? - are rare but not unknown. For the regular dopers (heh) they don't use those, they just smoke it.

And they smoke it often with some tobacco rolled in. I am in the UK - do you mean that, in the US, people, mostly smoke pure marijuana? People here don't empty out a cigar or whatever, they just have rolling tobacco as well as marijuana.

Yes, in the US people smoke pure marijuana, and no, a vaporizer is not the same as a bong. Bongs are at least somewhat common here. Vaporizers are special devices with integrated electrical heating systems that heat the marijuana to a temperature far short of combustion but high enough for the THC and other cannabinoids to evaporate. I've only used one once, a long time ago. The vapor collected in a plastic bag with a small opening that you could inhale it through. It was very effective and produced practically no smoke, so it was much less irritating to the lungs, and nothing was wasted.

[Alan Smithee]

Originally Posted by Ethilrist

Guys, take another look at what Qadgop said in post #5: One joint a day is equal to one pack of tobacco, not 20 joints. If somebody smokes one joint a day, they're at roughly the same risk as a one-pack-a-day tobacco smoker. People who smoke two or three joints a day are at two or three times the risk.

True, but with the medical pot you can get today a joint a day by yourself would be a lot. I would imagine anyone who smoked nearly that much would invest in a vaporizer: it would pay for itself just due to the better efficiency.

[aruvqan]

Originally Posted by Alan Smithee

True, but with the medical pot you can get today a joint a day by yourself would be a lot. I would imagine anyone who smoked nearly that much would invest in a vaporizer: it would pay for itself just due to the better efficiency.

No shit. I do a fairly small pinch morning and evening. Enough to take the edge off the pain but not enough to get particularly stoned.

Old school vaporizers - the kind that put the vapor into a balloon like bag are something on the order of $700. The magic flight box is way more reasonable at around $75. Purportedly the magic flight is stealthy enough that you can carry it with you and smoke it discreetly in sort of public. The less expensive one is getting to be fairly popular. Some people are working on making e-cig cartridges with hash oil.

[thelurkinghorror]

Aren't the dispensary limits usually some ridiculous number, like 2 oz. per week (I can't enter to verify)? At a joint a day, that would last you a very, very long time.

[Ethilrist]

Ah. I wasn't up on current dosages for marijuana. The stoners I knew in high school would light up on the walk to school, during lunch, after school...

[Jaledin]

2 oz per week is a crazy lot of shit to smoke for a regular person -- compounded with the intensity of all the "medicinal" I've, er, seen over the past few months. I bet people who find a strain that works for them and don't do much else during the day and have been doing it a while could easily cap an once per week.

Two ounces is a lot of weed, brah.

[Larry Mudd]

Originally Posted by Ethilrist

Guys, take another look at what Qadgop said in post #5: One joint a day is equal to one pack of tobacco, not 20 joints. If somebody smokes one joint a day, they're at roughly the same risk as a one-pack-a-day tobacco smoker. People who smoke two or three joints a day are at two or three times the risk.

Keep in mind that these numbers are heavily influenced by European stats, and that a "joint" is considered to contain an admixture of tobacco and cannabis. The harm comes from taking in great lungfuls of tobacco smoke and holding them as per cannabis use.

Studies that look at the actual impact of cannabis vs tobacco find otherwise.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Originally Posted by Larry Mudd

Keep in mind that these numbers are heavily influenced by European stats, and that a "joint" is considered to contain an admixture of tobacco and cannabis. The harm comes from taking in great lungfuls of tobacco smoke and holding them as per cannabis use.

Studies that look at the actual impact of cannabis vs tobacco find otherwise.

I am so not impressed by that link. It's a review article, published directly online by a guy who touts pot as a cancer cure and describes the cannabis flower as the most effective and versatile medicine known to mankind.
http://mendonews.wordpress.com/2010/...ocannabinoids/

And his cites in that article are cherry-picked, and the link between what he says they mean and they actually seem to mean are quite tenuous, IMHO.

As for the study I cited, here's a full copy: http://av.medpagetoday.com/upload/2008/2/1/280.pdf

In it you find that 3/4 of the pot smokers didn't smoke tobacco at all.

My basic assertion stands: There's not a lot of good data out there. The link I provided is a link to a tiny bit of what appears to be good data. More is needed, however. The review put out by Dr. Melamede is not chock-full of good data.

[Larry Mudd]

Originally Posted by Qadgop the Mercotan

I am so not impressed by that link. It's a review article, published directly online by a guy who touts pot as a cancer cure and describes the cannabis flower as the most effective and versatile medicine known to mankind.

Woof, that is embarrassing. First link.[/quote]

Originally Posted by QtM

As for the study I cited, here's a full copy: http://av.medpagetoday.com/upload/2008/2/1/280.pdf

Well, that's reassuring - it's my turn to be less-than impressed:

In total, 79 cases of lung cancer and 324 controls were included in the study.

Here's the National Cancer Institute's current consensus:

A large retrospective cohort study of 64,855 men aged 15 to 49 years from the United States found that Cannabis use was not associated with tobacco-related cancers and a number of other common malignancies. However, the study did find that, among nonsmokers of tobacco, ever having used Cannabis was associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer.

[6]cite quote:--> "We conclude that, in this relatively young study cohort, marijuana use and cancer were not associated in overall analyses, but that associations in nonsmokers of tobacco cigarettes suggested that marijuana use might affect certain site-specific cancer risks."

[Ethilrist]

Originally Posted by Larry Mudd

The harm comes from taking in great lungfuls of tobacco smoke and holding them as per cannabis use.

... marijuana is a gateway drug to tobacco now?

[Larry Mudd]

Originally Posted by Ethilrist

... marijuana is a gateway drug to tobacco now?

More that the risks of cannabis use of frequently inflated by conflation with tobacco use, as in the most recently publicized study from the British Lung Foundation, which alarmingly declared "cannabis smoke is twenty times more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke!"

However, they are looking at statistics reflecting typical British self-reporting cannabis users, ignoring that "the commonest method of using cannabis in the United Kingdom is to smoke cannabis resin mixed with tobacco, and nicotine use is very high among cannabis users."

Naturally, if you are smoking hash mixed with tobacco, and you're holding it in as people do when smoking hash, you're going to see more of the ill effects of tobacco. Studies that are scrupulous about disentangling tobacco use from cannabis arrive at dramatically different conclusions. (Note that QtM's study, quite apart from being statistically insignificant, also counts people who smoke tobacco "occasionally, but never daily" as non-users of tobacco. This does everything but explicitly select for people who season their weed with tobacco, taking in great lungfuls of tobacco smoke and holding it in.)

[Ethilrist]

I get all that, it just seems odd to me because back in 7th grade, the anti-drug propaganda was all geared towards telling us that tobacco leads to marijuana use. Go figure.

How many joints per ounce of marijuana, by the way? Some people are saying a joint a day, others are counting ounces per whenever. What's the conversion rate?

[Larry Mudd]

Originally Posted by Ethilrist

How many joints per ounce of marijuana, by the way? Some people are saying a joint a day, others are counting ounces per whenever. What's the conversion rate?

The usual rule-of-thumb is that one gram yields four joints, so an ounce would yield around 112 joints.

Of course, this is highly variable - in my experience, "joints" get much smaller as you age. Most I've seen in the past decade have been tiny pinners, cut in halves which are shared between two people - so by my lights I'd say "There are about eight hundred 'joints' in an ounce of cured cannabis." This statement would cause expulsions of smokey laughter from virtually everyone I knew in my twenties - at least when they were in their twenties.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Originally Posted by Larry Mudd

it's my turn to be less-than impressed

It is what it is, and it's a very small study but with some somewhat sound scientific underpinnings and assumptions.

As I've said over and over, we really don't know much yet about what pot does regarding cancer risk over the long run. Might be nothing, might be significantly more than nothing. The data isn't really very reassuring either way.

Me, I think it's less risky than tobacco, possibly a lot less risky. But none of the studies convince me it's safe as far as that risk goes.

[Shadowfyre]

So we have a joint at approximately a quarter gram.

I have trouble visualizing a quarter gram.

Most of the people I know (I can think of 5 people off the top of my head), go home and eat dinner and then do a one hitter to chill out for the evening. They may do more on occasion, but their daily use is one or two hits.

How many one hitters to a joint?

[CC]

My friend Ernie (heh heh) can get many loads of reefer into his one-hitter from the same amount of dope that would make one joint. Wild ass guess - 15. If he takes the proverbial one hit every other day or so, it would take him a couple weeks to smoke the equivalent of one whole joint.