It’s well known that cigarette smoking causes cancer.
Scientists have known that smoking tobacco causes cancer since at least the 1940s when evidence began building to establish a link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer.
Many people believe, however, that smoking marijuana cigarettes is healthier than smoking tobacco cigarettes, but is this accurate?
Part of the problem is that the effects of marijuana have not been as carefully and widely studied as those of tobacco.
“I’m sure there are differences between different types of smoke, and differences in the exact way they impact the lungs, but I don’t think we have any evidence that inhaling smoke is okay for our lungs,” Beth Cohen, professor of Medicine at UCSF, told Health.
The New York Post reports on a new study showing that smoking marijuana can increase the risk for certain cancers normally associated with smoking tobacco. Here’s the start of the story:
Here’s some sobering news for stoners.
Frequent, heavy pot smoking may raise the risk for head and neck cancers, a new University of Southern California study finds.
Marijuana users are between 3.5 and 5 times more likely to develop those cancers, known as HNCs, than those who pass on joints, according to research published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery.
“This is one of the first studies — and the largest that we know of to date — to associate head and neck cancer with cannabis use,” said Dr. Niels Kokot, a head and neck surgeon at Keck Medicine of USC and senior author of the study. “The detection of this risk factor is important because head and neck cancer may be preventable once people know which behaviors increase their risk.”
HNCs, which include cancers of the oral and nasal cavities, pharynx, larynx, salivary glands and thyroid, account for nearly 3% of cancer diagnoses and more than 1.5% of cancer deaths in the US.
Meanwhile, marijuana is “the most commonly used illicit substance worldwide,” per the study, with usage steadily increasing over the past decade.