Note that smoking cannabis does not have the same cancer health problems as tobacco, tar is not really the issue here. In fact cannabis has a very slight but detectable protective effect for nearly all cancers. Generally, most of the problems with smoking cannabis involve heat-induced damage to the lungs, not the same things that make tobacco smoke dangerous.
So far the evidence seems to show that smoking and vaping cannabis does not have nearly the potential for lung cancer that tobacco smoking does. It is associated with various respiratory ailments (under heavy use). And it may have a slight protective effect against some cancers.
As usual, more and higher-quality data would help elucidate the source of the protective effects.
you're oversimplifying. the quantity and quality of the smoke is hugely important. cannabis smoke and tobacco smoke are qualitatively different, and the typical amount consumed by cannabis vs. tobacco smokers is a very different quantity (in that tobacco smokers typically consume tens or even hundreds of times more mass of tobacco per day than cannabis smokers do).
certainly any kind of inhaled smoke can cause issues for your lungs, but conflating the cancer risk of daily habitual tobacco smoking (very high) with the cancer risk of daily habitual cannabis smoking (probably present, but not yet known how much more risk it causes) is a distortion.
It gets pretty confusing when cannabis itself is thought to have anti-cancer properties and the actual amount and temperature of the smoke is much less than that of tobacco. Yeah breathing in any smoke is not good for you, but is it like smoking a pack of cigarettes? Or is it like enjoying a campfire and breathing in a small bit of smoke? One is profoundly bad for you, the other is of such little concern that nobody should be worrying about it unless they have serious lung conditions.
Tobacco is carcinogenic, even if chewed or sucked, and lacks any legitimate medical use. However Cannabis has many medicinal uses, is very safe and non-toxic with no signs that it causes cancer. I don't think that smoking weed is necessarily good though - I would recommend vaporizing it.
It seems pretty unlikely that cannabis smoking is significantly safer than tobacco smoking for lung health, and far more likely that the gap in outcomes in the literature is due to the difficulty (historically) of doing studies on the same scale as the tobacco studies.
We seem too ready to forget that the cancer/tobacco link was itself once controversial.
"Smoking is the most significant of these, causing around a quarter of all cancers globally."
Except for that the research shows that smoking doesn't cause cancer, except maybe for tobacco. And even the surgeon general now apparently admits that most cancers that tobacco users suffer from probably aren't from tobacco.[1]
It's a LOT less harmful than tobacco. It also is usable in many non-smoking forms. Tobacco chew and snuff still give you cancer. But, since USA has outlawed research there is ver limited data on how not bad cannabis is.
> Tobacco has dramatic negative consequences for those who smoke it. In addition to its high addiction potential [1], tobacco is causally associated with over 400,000 deaths yearly in the United States, and has a significant negative effect on health in general [2]. More specifically, over 140,000 lung-related deaths in 2001 were attributed to tobacco smoke [3]. Comparable consequences would naturally be expected from cannabis smoking since the burning of plant material in the form of cigarettes generates a large variety of compounds that possess numerous biological activities [4].
> While cannabis smoke has been implicated in respiratory dysfunction, including the conversion of respiratory cells to what appears to be a pre-cancerous state [5], it has not been causally linked with tobacco related cancers [6] such as lung, colon or rectal cancers. Recently, Hashibe et al [7] carried out an epidemiological analysis of marijuana smoking and cancer. A connection between marijuana smoking and lung or colorectal cancer was not observed. These conclusions are reinforced by the recent work of Tashkin and coworkers [8] who were unable to demonstrate a cannabis smoke and lung cancer link, despite clearly demonstrating cannabis smoke-induced cellular damage.
> Furthermore, compounds found in cannabis have been shown to kill numerous cancer types including: lung cancer [9], breast and prostate [10], leukemia and lymphoma [11], glioma [12], skin cancer [13], and pheochromocytoma [14]. The effects of cannabinoids are complex and sometimes contradicting, often exhibiting biphasic responses. For example, in contrast to the tumor killing properties mentioned above, low doses of THC may stimulate the growth of lung cancer cells in vitro [15].
Actually, people have studied the effects of cannabis smoke inhalation on lungs, and the results so far so some negative effects (respiratory disease), but the effects are fairly small. There is no correlation between cannabis smoking and lung cancer, in fact, smoking it seems to have a mildly protective effect (this is still being actively debated in the literature).
That actually directly contradicts the OP's statement.
There is evidence that cannabis smoking is associated with an increased risk for lung cancer. (See "Cigarette smoking and other risk factors for lung cancer", section on 'Marijuana'.)
Its a hard connection to prove, but all smoke contains chemicals that are known to cause cancer. Eaten cannabis probably isn't carcinogenic, but smoked probably is. Few cannabis smokers inhale nearly as much smoke as tobacco smokers. Also, tobacco is a nightshade and toxic if eaten, so maybe that has something to with it being more damaging when smoked.
The content of cannabis smoke is quite different from tobacco smoke, and in particular it contains a lot of terpenes, and the cannabinoids themselves, which are potent antioxidants.
Last I checked, cannabis smoke was implicated in COPD, but doesn't appear to contribute to lung cancer. That was at least a decade ago, however.
That's not 100% accurate. Even though Marijuana is believed to be a cancer-fighting compound, when smoked it may have similar or even greater cancer-causing effects as tobacco does due to in many cases having more tars than cigarette tobacco does.
However, the jury is still out, and there is the issue where unless you're Willie Nelson you aren't exactly chain smoking joints the way your average hardcore cigarette smoker does, so even if marijuana is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco, being exposed to a lower dose may mitigate that to enough of an extent as to make it a rounding error.
Either way, you are more likely to be killed in a dispute over marijuana than you are by marijuana consumption itself.
Sorry, your argument intuitively sounds valid but it isn't. I know because I made the same assumptions but my reading of the scientific literature has convinced me otherwise.
As one example, "tar" inhaled from cannabis is not correlated with long-term diseases like lung cancer, throat cancer, etc. However, the "tar" (a very vague term) from tobacco, wood smoke, etc is horrifically damaging to your body.
The reason weed is less cancerous than tobacco is because weed smokers typically smoke far less total volume of plant matter than tobacco smokers. Cigarette smokers light up many times every day. Most weed smokers only use it recreationally on an occasional basis, because it's not as addictive.
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