CT scans show cigarettes are harder on the lungs than marijuana

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.

Eh, they are both fairly harmless on the brain. (At least directly.)

What kills you is the tar in your lungs (and on the way there, like your throat). And you get that from burning stuff in general.

Isn't the "natural" reduction in frequency a factor which should not be accounted for as it might actually be the driving force behind it?

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.

Tobacco absorbs and concentrates radioactive metals in soil and fertilizers. Cannabis does not do this. https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/data-research/facts-sta...

The tobacco industry was well-aware of the risk from radioactivity since the 1950s. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/big-tobacco-knew-rad...

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.

So according to https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica... about 29% of male uses use canabis 5-6 times a week. Presumably the top 5% smoke canabis even more.

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.

> [...] 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.

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.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1277837/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0...

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.

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.

Depends. You probably don't smoke as many of those as your typical cigarette chain smoker?

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.)

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.