Yeah, but as I see it, to be fair you’d have to put that up against only lighting up cigarettes on the occasional weekend. With either one, there’s a big difference between the potential harm done by once-in-a-while indulgence vs. constant smoking.
I picked pot, though I hesitated, because as of present day, smoking pot may get you in trouble with the law, and may interfere with your ability to get cleared for a job if you’re caught smoking it. But smoking tobacco is more damaging to your health and more addictive from everything I can tell. And I think the real clincher is how many tobacco smokers I’ve met who want to quit and feel helpless. Pot smoking seems to be far more of an elective activity than tobacco smoking is.
I am convinced that tobacco killed my father and nearly did me in, but there was likely a genetic sensitivity. Any suggestion that tobacco is not highly addictive is fatuous.
My father smoked all his adult life and had his first heart attack at age 43, continued to smoke, and had his second and fatal one 20 years later. I had my first and only heart attack at age 28, never touched another cigarette and here I am, relatively healthy, 55 years later. So given my experience, I would have been horrified had any of my kids taken up smoking. Whether any of them uses pot, I haven’t any idea. I think not One of them never drinks while the other two are casual drinkers, mainly wine.
Lit?
You snort them, silly! Got to be runny, though.
Children sometimes disappoint. For me, I continue to love them and cherish my time with them, although both my daughters have smoked pot and cigarettes. I think they are both firmly and permanently off cigarettes. The pot smoking seems to be occasional, which is fine. I do the same.
There is no question it would not be tobacco. I went through hell battling that addiction. I quit 14 years ago as of January (it’s hard to believe I was posting here back then!) and I wouldn’t want either of my kids to go through that. And I see now how nasty it was, how bad it was for me. How it smelled, how it lingered in our home and on my children’s clothes. Pot I smoked in spells. It’s not legal here so I can’t get it that often. It’s mostly been from being at someone’s house and they offered it. My ex brought me a tin of it last year from Colorado and between me and a few others it lasted a few months. I REALLY enjoy it, but I’ve never felt any sort of addiction. Even with that tin and having access to it every day when it was gone it was a few days of wishing I had more but that was it. I would like to have it but I’m not digging in to public ashtrays for a butt, which is something I’m ashamed to say I did more than once when I was young.
Anyway both my kids are a lot like me. I think they’d enjoy pot. I KNOW my daughter does but it’s like with me. If she can at a party she will but when she knew she needed to stop to try to get a job she went months easily saying no when offered. And like me she LOVES it. But we have responsibilities. Cigarette addiction though, you can get them easy, it’s not that expensive to start smoking. Not here anyway. And once it has you in it’s grips … I’m going to say this. As I write this, despite 14 years passing, I can still taste it and feel that pull in my mouth, the craving. I will never smoke again because I never want to go through quitting again. I still dream about smoking though.
If you had aaid ‘adult child’, then pot easily. But pot can acrually harm the brains of children, and it can reduce a persin’s work ethic and lower their inhibitions. The munchies make many pot heads overweight. Pot use at a young age has also been linked to schizophrenia.
But if everyone is over 25 and out of school, I would certainly choose pot over tobacco.
I’d prefer that my hypothetical children get into gardening.
There are a number of ornamental forms of Nicotiana. Cannabis sativa, not so much.*
*although Cannabis lookalikes can be fun to grow.
At my peak, I smoked about two packs a day (this was in my mid-to-late 20s). I’ve smoked pot maybe a couple dozen times in my life. I think I would go with the pot. I was lucky with the cigarettes, as just one day I stopped smoking, for no reason that I could ascertain other than my brain just said, let’s not get cigarettes today and that continued until now (well, I did smoke a pack when my uncle died, and a few “social” cigarettes in the last 18 years, but never relapsed into smoking.) But I’ve seen people try to quit cigarettes, and it ain’t a pretty sight, and the damage it does to your lungs. I mean, pot does too, of course.
At the end of the day, my vote would be towards whichever ends up causing fewer health problems. I think right now pot would be less harmful than tobacco overall, but I can be convinced otherwise. When I was in my 20s, most of my friends were smokers, and, actually, I gravitated towards smokers moreso than I did potheads (though there was often overlap–many smokers didn’t smoke pot, but many pot smokers did also smoke tobacco).
Pot, hands down. Too many members of my family died from the effects of smoking tobacco. One of the good things about pot is you don’t have to smoke it.
have there been any comparison studies of rate of lung cancer in pot smokers? After all, pot smokers hold smoke in lungs longer than tobacco (and any plant smoked was not meant to be)
As we are in IMHO I can report what my doctors told me, cannabis alone is unlikely to cause issues but my severe COPD rolled in at a relatively young age because of my mixing of the two and deep inhalation and long holds taking tobacco smoke into every corner, the weed was the delivery device for the poison.
I don’t know why everyone freaks out at lung cancer, that took my mother in a pretty quick and relatively painless few months. I’ve been drowning for over a decade. Cancer kills, COPD tortures (until you get the lung cancer).
Pot. But I don’t vote in public polls.