I don't buy the logic in your last paragraph. Cannabis consumption in the US for the last ~80 years has been furtive. For most of the last 80 years, tobacco was as mainstream as Coca Cola. I don't think we can easily draw conclusions about lung disease from the facts we have available right now.
That's ok, it's not important to my point; it's just weak but confirmatory evidence of my prediction.
Still, after 80 years, how are you splitting responsibility for that between our laws and culture and the substance itself? Smoking cigarettes furtively is much more difficult than smoking weed furtively[0], due to the exact same two factors I pointed out previously.
If the same evidence that predicts you'll see less disease predicts you'll see fewer of the users, does not seeing as many users really count against the prediction of less disease? At the very least it seems like you'd have to assign some priors in order to know which way that evidence points.
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