According to a recent study, smoking weed is as dangerous as smoking tobacco.
Dr. Giselle Revah, an assistant professor in the department of radiology at the University of Ottawa in Ontario argues that: “There’s a public perception that marijuana is safer than tobacco, and this study raises concern this may not be true.”
She adds that, according to The American Lung Association, the only thing that should go into your lungs is clean air, anything else is potentially harmful to the lungs.
Nearly 67 per cent of the tobacco-only smokers, the report seen by The Kenya Times indicate, had emphysema, while only five per cent of the nonsmokers had the disease.
“A difference of 8 percentage points between weed plus tobacco and tobacco-only smokers may not seem like a huge difference, but it was significant,” said.
Published this week in Radiology, in a journal of the Radiological Society of North America, the study “compared computed tomography (CT) chest scans from 56 people who smoked marijuana and tobacco with lung scans of 33 people who had been heavy cigarette smokers for over 25 years.”
Scans from an additional 57 nonsmokers with no preexisting lung disease, chemotherapy or other history of lung damage were used as controls.
Some 75 per cent of the people in the study, Sandee LaMotte notes, who smoked marijuana and tobacco had emphysema, “a disease of the small airways that causes damage to the air sacs in the lungs.”
However, Revah said, “there are several differences in how weed and tobacco are consumed that could provide clues for further investigation.”
“If you’re smoking an unfiltered joint, let’s say, more particulates will reach the airways, get deposited and become irritants, which is why you see the mucus and the inflammation,” she said.
