Could smoking pot raise testicular cancer risk?

Testicular cancer is relatively rare — a man’s lifetime chance of developing the disease is about 1 in 300 (and dying of it is about 1 in 5,000). Frequent or long-term marijuana smokers could have about double the risk of nonusers, according to the report in the February 9 issue of the journal Cancer.

In the study, a team led by Dr. Janet R. Daling of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, interviewed 369 men between the ages of 18 and 44 from the Seattle-Puget Sound area whose testicular cancer had been diagnosed. They compared those men with 979 men who lived in the same area, but did not have cancer.

Overall, 26 percent of the testicular cancer patients were pot smokers (15 percent who used daily or weekly) at the time of diagnosis, compared with 20 percent of men without cancer (10 percent who used daily or weekly).

Marijuana users had 2.3 times the risk of a type of testicular cancer known as a nonseminoma as those who were not. Testicular cancer is divided into two types, pure seminomas (60 percent of cases) and nonseminomas (40 percent of cases.) The link was much weaker in men with seminomas.

Prepare for the mainstream media and the government prohibitionists to crow about this study.  What do you think the first pot-pun headline will be?  I’ve got dibs on “Your nuts if you use pot.”  Or how about “Pitchers and bartenders aren’t only ones concerned with high balls”?

You know they won’t read far enough to get to the caveats…
 

These types of studies have one important caveat — cancer patients may be more likely to remember – or may be more honest about – past drug use than men in the general population.

Some experts say the association is a tenuous one, particularly because seminomas have increased 64 percent from 1973 to 1998, while nonseminoma rates rose only 24 percent.

Without stronger proof, critics say the study should be taken with a grain of salt. “There’s always been the thought that cannabinoids had some interaction with the reproductive systems, so maybe they’re onto something. Who knows?” said [Steve Shoptaw, a professor in the department of family medicine and psychiatry at UCLA.] ”But now we need to isolate the actual physiological responses.”

“The bottom line is that I would not start warning my marijuana smokers that they are going to get testicular cancer,” he said. “I don’t think there’s enough here to go forward with that message, at least not yet.”

via Could smoking pot raise testicular cancer risk? – CNN.com.

I don’t tease these researchers because I believe marijuana smoking is a harmless activity – it isn’t.  But by now, enough people have smoked enough marijuana for enough time that if there were any certain and serious side effects we’d know by now.  These studies seeking to link marijuana to schizophrenia, testicular cancer, infertility, etc. all seem like desperate attempts to implicate pot as something more dangerous than it really is.

Regardless, even if these studies prove true and show these alleged risks of marijuana, so what?  We have a legal product proven to be engineered to be more addictive, proven to be deadly harmful to one’s health, proven to be harmful to other people’s health, yet we regulate and allow its sale and use to all adults over the age of 18.  Marijuana will never be shown to be more harmful than cigarettes, so why do our laws favor and incentivize the use of the deadly product over the safer one?