CNN: Will daily pot usage hurt my health?

Will daily pot usage hurt my health? – CNN.com
Will daily pot usage hurt my health?
Asked by Pat, Kansas

I don’t smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, but I have smoked marijuana daily for the last 25 years. Although I have enjoyed good health all my life, I would like to know what concerns I should have with long-term marijuana usage.

Well, I’d say no alcohol and tobacco already just added years to your life.  You’ve been a toker for 25 years and say you have good health.  (I believe you, because I’ve been toking for nearly twenty years and have fantastic health.)   I’d say your biggest concern, long-term, isn’t health-related, it is avoiding arrest, incarceration, civil asset forfeiture, and losing your job, licenses, home, and children.

But I’m no doctor.  You really need long-term medical advice as (I assume) at least a 43-year-old person looking after your health in your geriatric years.  So, naturally, for the expert answer, CNN turns to a pediatrician from the Children’s Medical Group, Dr. Jennifer Shu:

Expert Answer

Thank you for this important question. Roughly 40 percent of Americans have tried marijuana, and about 10 percent continue to use it on a regular basis, so this issue is probably more common than one might expect.

Good so far.  Our government’s NSDUH survey says 40.6% of Americans 12 and older have tried cannabis, 10.1% use cannabis annually, and 5.8% use cannabis at least once per month.  About 1.3% of Americans 12 and older are daily (>300 days/year) cannabis users.

For comparison’s sake, the number of people who have tried cannabis is about the same as the number of adult females in America; annual users equal about as many non-Cuban/non-Puerto Rican Hispanics in this country; there are about the same number of monthly users as Native Americans, Native Alaskans, and Asians combined; and people like me who use nearly daily outnumber Puerto Ricans.

The active chemical in marijuana, THC, works on receptors in the brain. In the short term, or within hours of smoking the drug, lower doses can cause feelings of relaxation or distort your senses, whereas higher doses may create hallucinations, learning and memory problems and impaired coordination — which is why it’s not a good idea to drive or play sports when under the influence.

This is true and good advice.  I don’t know about the “within hours” part; it’s a couple of hours at best, but “within hours” makes it sound like much more than two.  The feelings of relaxation and sensory distortion take place within seconds.

Over the long term, the tar in marijuana may put a person at risk for lung cancer, much as cigarette smoke does.

Lie.  Dr. Donald Tashkin at the UCLA Medical Center showed that even heavy chronic smoking of cannabis does not lead to increased risk of head, neck, or lung cancers.  And he’s no “pro-pot” doctor; he was trying to prove the cannabis/lung cancer connection to bolster the ONDCP’s anti-pot propaganda when he discovered this!

Smoking marijuana can also cause asthma, bronchitis, sinus infections and a sore throat, especially in heavy users.

Inhaling smoke is never a healthy choice for your lungs, period.  That said, cannabis smoke is far less harmful than tobacco smoke.  According to the National Institutes of Medicine, “Cannabinoids or their analogues may also find a place in the management of resistant glaucoma, of severe intractable asthma…” and as cannabis is a bronchodilator and anti-spasmodic, the thirteen states that recognize medical use of cannabis all allow its use for asthma.

Cannabis smoking can lead to minor repiratory complications, but not to emphysema, as tobacco smoke will.  According to researchers writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “long-term marijuana smoking was associated with an increased risk of certain respiratory complications — including cough, bronchitis, phlegm, and wheezing.” 

Of course, the answer to this point is to use a cannabis vaporizer rather than smoking it.  Vaporization heats the bud to the point where THC evaporates, but not hot enough for the plant matter to burn.  Thus you receive all the cannabinoid medicine goodness without all the harms of smoking.

Marijuana may also impair the immune system’s ability to fight off certain infections.

Lie.  Cannabis is recognized as a treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS – why would doctors recommend something that suppresses the immune system to people suffereing from a disease that compromises the immune system?  In fact, “data indicates that cannabis use does not adversely impact CD4 and CD8 T cell counts,[7] and may even improve immune function.[8-9]“

There is also some evidence that marijuana can trigger heart attacks in people who already have or are at risk for coronary heart disease.

She may be referring to this study, which found among cannabis users an increase in a protein that increases the risk of clogged arteries which increases the risk of heart attacks.  Of course, this increased protein was found in subjects who used 11-to-50 joints per day.

The problem with the study, however, is they didn’t find out whether those heavy cannabis smokers actually had more heart attacks.  Other research has shown that frequent cannabis users are as nutritionally healthy as non-smokers and actually have lower BMI (a measure of obesity) rates than non-smokers.  According to Dr. Murray Mittleman, director of cardiovascular epidemiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, “the risk of heart attack was slightly increased in the first hour after smoking [marijuana], but dissipated shortly after that… the heightened risk from marijuana [was found] to be roughly equivalent to vigorous exercise for someone of average fitness, and far less than that posed by air pollution.”  Mittleman estimates the risk of a heart attack for an otherwise healthy 50-year old man after smoking marijuana is about 10 in one million.

Now, if you’re not otherwise healthy, if you do have heart disease, you probably shouldn’t smoke cannabis.  But that’s not you, Pat from Kansas, you said you were in good health, right?

Because marijuana acts on the brain, chronic use can also make it difficult to concentrate, pay attention and learn. Some studies have shown that regular marijuana smokers may function at a lower intellectual level all the time since the drug can keep affecting the brain for weeks after using.

Not at all possible.  The chemical that “affects the brain” is delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC.  THC is processed and out of your bloodstream within two to five hours.  After that, the only thing “affecting the brain for weeks” are the inert metabolites of THC, known as THC-COOH.  This is the metabolite that is picked up on drug tests for “weeks after using”, and it is absolutely non-psychoactive.  THC-COOH only proves you have used cannabis in the past, it does not indicate present impairment.  This would be kind of like saying alcohol will affect your brain for weeks because we found beer cans in your garbage two weeks after your party.

Researchers writing for the journal of Psychopharmacology found “marijuana smoking has virtually no effect on complex cognitive task performance – including reaction time, memory and mental calculation – in experienced users.”

People who try to stop using marijuana after years of use may have withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, drug craving and insomnia, making it hard to quit.

Few things insult me more than anti-cannabis blowhards talking about the withdrawal symptoms from quitting cannabis.  As a twelve-year-old boy, I watched my father spend three weeks locked up in a single wide trailer trying to quit alcohol and amphetimines cold turkey.  (He’d locked himself in there because, as average Americans, we had no health care insurance that would cover inpatient drug rehab, even if there were beds available, which there weren’t.)  When you can show me a pothead writhing in agony, puking on the floor, shivering with cold sweats, picking bugs off his skin, trembling uncontrollably, and cowering in fear of death, then you can talk to me about marijuana’s withdrawal symptoms.

Because of the possible difficulty quitting the drug and the many health concerns associated with long-term smoking, I advise regular users to consult with their doctor or an addiction medicine specialist to help them stop.

Because this pediatrician has no idea what she’s talking about, I advise regular users to invest in a vaporizer.