"Even infrequent abuse can cause burning and stinging of the mouth and throat, often accompanied by a heavy cough.
I'd venture to say that these things are exaggerated in the infrequent user. Like cigarettes, the frequent user gets "used" to them. (What I REALLY think is: Oh, my God. burning and stinging of the mouth! The horror of it all! And a heavy cough! I might as well commit suicide knowing somebody somewhere has a heavy cough!)
Someone who smokes marijuana regularly may have many of the same respiratory problems that tobacco smokers do, such as daily cough and phlegm production, more frequent acute chest illness, a heightened risk of lung infections, and a greater tendency to obstructed airways9.
No doubt. They're purposely inhaling smoke.
Smoking marijuana possibly increases the likelihood of developing cancer of the head or neck. A study comparing 173 cancer patients and 176 healthy individuals produced evidence that marijuana smoking doubled or tripled the risk of these cancers10.
Again, they're purposely inhaling smoke.
Let's have a look at what smoke is. If you were to pump oxygen through either type of cigarette and smoke it slowly enough, presuming you didn't set yourself afire, you would be inhaling carbon dioxide and water and some oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. Remaining would be "ash", which, unlike the ash that does remain normally, would not contain any organics of any kind.
But if you were to heat either type of cigarette in an oxygen-free atmosphere, you would have pyrolysis. For the most part, the carbon would rearrange itself into charcoal, with some embedded nitrogen and sulfur, and ash (metal oxides, much of the oxygen coming from the original cellulose in the plant material you are pyrolizing).
Charcoal is sort of like layers of chicken wire made of carbon.
If you burn either type of cigarette in normal air, you get something in between. You get some carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. You get vaporized organics that already exist. You get some ash. And you get smoke. Smoke is partially-constructed charcoal. Like cutting 4-5 hexagons out of the chickenwire. Chemicals based on carbon arranged in a hexagon are called aromatic hydrocarbons. When a few of these hexagons join up with common sides, they're called polyaromatic hydrocarbons. You might have seen these called PAHs. These are pretty nasty, and, for the most part, the carcinogenic part of smoke. They don't have to be converted to anything by any enzymes.
Smoke pot, you inhale PAH plus some THC and a plethora of stuff. Smoke cigarettes, you inhale PAH plus some nicotine and a plethora of stuff. Stand in the middle of a forest fire, same thing. Notice the similarity of the color of cigarette/pot smoke to the color of a car burning oil heavily? Wonder what that's about?
Both nicotine and THC can be made ingestible without the smoke, and with the greatest of ease.
So we can really drop the cancer argument right away.
Marijuana abuse also has the potential to promote cancer of the lungs and other parts of the respiratory tract because it contains irritants and carcinogens9,11.
Both of them contain the results of burning nitrogen and sulfur containing chemicals (which any plant is full of) in air, to name a few, sulfur dioxide, sulfur trioxide, ammonia, nitrous and nitric oxide. Most of those are fairly irritating.
In fact, marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than does tobacco smoke12.
I'm a little suspicious about that claim. However, since THC is nearly a PAH, I might buy it upon further investigation. But remember that we don't have to smoke either tobacco or pot to get the active ingredients.
It also induces high levels of an enzyme that converts certain hydrocarbons into their carcinogenic form—levels that may accelerate the changes that ultimately produce malignant cells13.
I'd like to see more about that, too. It's pretty easy to target a study looking for an influence on enzymes you think might support your thesis (pot is bad) and ignore influences on enzymes that might not be so supportive.
Marijuana users usually inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than tobacco smokers do, which increases the lungs' exposure to carcinogenic smoke. These facts suggest that, puff for puff, smoking marijuana may be more harmful to the lungs than smoking tobacco."
Could be. But it could just as easily be that since THC is fat soluble and not so water soluble it hangs on the surfaces of the lung tissue longer and takes longer to get absorbed than nicotine does. Since it's close to being a PAH itself, that might mean it dissolves in deposited PAH, sort of acting as a detergent and allowing more PAH to be coughed up, which explains increased coughing and might lend itself to reduced risk for cancer over cigarette smoke.
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Ya see, there are lots of ways to twist even scientific results. And I suspect someone is trying to prove something, and there's a lot of ways to skin a cat.
Just look at the Partnership for a Drug Free America's TV ads. They presume teenagers are dolts, which they are not. Think about it. Kids COULD get high by drinking gasoline. But when was the last time you heard of THAT happening? The reason that the answer is "never" is that everybody, but everybody agrees that drinking gasoline is deadly. Kids see that, and they don't have to do the experiment themselves.
Kids also see that these commercials, and all those less-slick ones before them, are nothing but baloney. When parents agree with the commercials' messages, they become liars in the kid's eyes as well, leading to all sorts of chaos.
I just recently saw a newspaper article warning that kids are starting to drink cough syrup containing dextromethorphan to get high. Guess what? This phemomenon is at least 6 years old. It isn't news.
For at least 6 years, kids have been downing dextromethorphan cough syrups or pills to get high because it's legal to buy and pot isn't. Unfortunately, cough syrup isn't cough syrup isn't cough syrup. There's different stuff in each type. Overuse the wrong type (the only way to get high is to use much more than the recommended dose) and you permanently destroy your liver or have an instant heart attack.
Don't kid yourself (no pun intended). This isn't "for the children". What it is is a way to snooker the unsuspecting public into giving up their constitutional rights, and it's worked like a charm.
