Pot smokers don't puff away lung health: study

[RainDog]

101. if you're interested

Here is a doctor who talks about current uses at a conference at UW-Madison Medical School in 2007.

David Bearman M.D., Santa Barbara, California, is one of the leading physicians in the U.S. in the field of medical marijuana. He has spent 40 years working in substance and drug abuse treatment and prevention programs. Dr. Bearman was a pioneer in the free and community clinic movement. His career includes public health, administrative medicine, primary care, pain management and cannabinology.

Bearman's not a pulmonary specialist, however. Dr. Tashkin is.

Tashkin recruited 400 people for an experiment (beyond the ones I linked to initially here.) These people had various levels of usage, including heavy usage.

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Part 1 looks at overall lung function and various studies.

Donald P. Tashkin, MD - Medical Director of the Pulmonary Function Laboratory, Professor of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles. Presented to Fifth Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics held in Pacific Grove, CA, April, 2008

His findings in this study replicate his earlier studies. He includes a study from 2007 in New Zealand, another study in Arizona...

regular heavy smoking of cannabis is asso. with coughing and sputum. bronchitis. inflammation of the bronchia. that is not the same as lung disease.

he notes COPD, i.e. emphysema, is not evidenced with cannabis but it is with tobacco. loss of lung function...all lung function for the cannabis users was within the normal function in his large study. The New Zealand study confirmed this. The Arizona study found it might, in the future, lead to COPD.

COPD tends to occur later in life. This is why the study in the OP, a twenty-year study, is considered important b/c of the normal onset of COPD - or decrease in lung function.

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Part 2 looks at emphysema

The New Zealand study only found emphysema in the tobacco smokers.

He talks about 4 individuals who were reported with billae (not generalized emphysema) and those people were also associated with cigarette smoking.

Marijuana smokers, even if they smoked tobacco as well, as the same rate of lung function, over time, as non-smokers of any kind. Only tobacco-smokers had decreased lung function.

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Part 3 looks a lung cancer

I think what you find, often, is that the govt. has so consistently lied about the properties of cannabis, in general, that people in the U.S. who know about this history begin to have a "the boy who cried wolf" reaction.

The govt. has hurt its capacity, or anyone else's, to make a case about real issues concerning cannabis b/c of this long history of lying about the same.

People know about the bad studies the govt has done and tried to hide - like the one in which they suffocated monkeys and claimed mj causes brain damage - and then tried to deny access to others who wanted to look at the study. (That was in the 1980s.)

People know that the govt tried to make it hard to obtain early studies that other researchers sought out later b/c they didn't like the positive results of those studies. That's not science. That's politics.

This is why prohibition is such a bad idea. In order to maintain it, the govt has been so willing to lie or obscure that they have lost their authority among a population and have created disrespect for institutions that are supposed to exist to provide information, not support for bad law.