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It is a destructive habit. Smoking anything is bad for you. Marijuana just replaces nicotine with THC as the active ingredient the user gets hooked on. You light a substance on fire and inhale the smoke. This is not what your pulmonary and cardiovascular systems were designed around. That it hasn't killed you doesn't negate the innumerable facts about the health and wellness downsides to smoking ANYTHING.
And PS - if you've done anything regularly for 47 years, that's an addiction, no scare quotes required. And it will catch up with you, smoking generally catches up with everyone. Some people manage to escape an become the one in a million example of beating the odds, but everyone else has the odds beat them. Good on you if you can hit the pipe regularly and live to be 100, but I doubt you find too many doctors recommending it as a path to longevity, eh?
Doctors don't study cannabis, only toxic pills that generate trillions a year revenues, while killing nearly 1/4 million Americans per year. Doctors get their license to practice taken away if they use cannabis, as pill companies don't want then to know it's not so bad.
Addictions and death don't always go together. What is wrong with repeating an enjoyable activity that does not kill? Cannabis has at least 8 anti-cancer cannabinoids, they aren't in tobacco. So it has been proven not all smoke is the same.
Cannabis widens blood vessels, lowering blood pressure. The poison nicotine raises blood pressure as it narrows blood vessels. The poison nicotine also paralyzes the cilia that clean the lungs. Cannabis does not paralyze the lung cleaners, so one can cough immediately, rather than waiting many hours for the lung cleaners to start working again. Best wishes.
Inhaling smoke be it from pot or cigs is harmful to your lungs. Marijuana may infact have health benefits, but smoking it does not do your lungs good.
You are obviously quite ignorant that the feds spent your tax dollars to hire a lung doctor to conduct research that was intended to provide proof that smoking marijuana causes lung cancer. After years of research the doctor gave up and concluded that smoking marijuana does not cause lung cancer.
Thanks to all the folks jumping on me. You've proven my point about the cultural narrative. Marijuana is seen as positive in the current cultural narrative, and cigarettes are not. I editorialized on why that may be, but the bottom line is that one is favored within the mass media consciousness and the other has fallen into serious disfavor. Go back to the 1950s and all the black and white John Wayne WW II flicks. Cigarettes enjoyed the same (better actually) cultural narrative that marijuana enjoys right now. 4 out of 5 doctors smoked Camel!
With individual behaviors that ostensibly don't hurt anyone else, why one thing is seen as bad and another is seen as good is a whim of the cultural narrative. Period.
Thanks to all the folks jumping on me. You've proven my point about the cultural narrative. Marijuana is seen as positive in the current cultural narrative, and cigarettes are not. I editorialized on why that may be, but the bottom line is that one is favored within the mass media consciousness and the other has fallen into serious disfavor. Go back to the 1950s and all the black and white John Wayne WW II flicks. Cigarettes enjoyed the same (better actually) cultural narrative that marijuana enjoys right now. 4 out of 5 doctors smoked Camel!
With individual behaviors that ostensibly don't hurt anyone else, why one thing is seen as bad and another is seen as good is a whim of the cultural narrative. Period.
Thanks to all the folks jumping on me. You've proven my point about the cultural narrative. Marijuana is seen as positive in the current cultural narrative, and cigarettes are not. I editorialized on why that may be, but the bottom line is that one is favored within the mass media consciousness and the other has fallen into serious disfavor. Go back to the 1950s and all the black and white John Wayne WW II flicks. Cigarettes enjoyed the same (better actually) cultural narrative that marijuana enjoys right now. 4 out of 5 doctors smoked Camel!
With individual behaviors that ostensibly don't hurt anyone else, why one thing is seen as bad and another is seen as good is a whim of the cultural narrative. Period.
Period? Not quite.
The HUGE difference you are overlooking is that cigarettes have killed millions (480,000 per year). Cannabis has been in use by millions since the black and white TV era WITH NOT EVEN ONE DOCUMENTED CANCER DEATH OR OVERDOSE.
I challenge you to prove that statement to not be true.
If you insist on dumbing it down to an over-simplified definition that one has to be positive and the other negative, then yes, marijuana is definitely the positive one, but not because of whims.
EDIT: I am sorry you feel jumped on, I don't think that was anyone's intention. It is just that when you present your editorial as facts, when you obviously do not know all the facts about marijuana, it is to be expected that some of us with experience with the plant, who have also researched this issue extensively, will interject some firmly worded corrections.
The HUGE difference you are overlooking is that cigarettes have killed millions (480,000 per year). Cannabis has been in use by millions since the Black and White TV era WITH NOT EVEN ONE DOCUMENTED CANCER DEATH OR OVERDOSE.
I challenge you to prove that statement to not be true.
If you insist on dumbing it down to an over-simplified definition that one has to be positive and the other negative, then yes, marijuana is definitely the positive one.
OK folks, first of all, I am a serious libertarian, so I am fine and dandy with marijuana, cigarettes, pipes, cigars, whatever. I also was once both pack a day cigarette smoker and off and on again pot smoker. I am not being judgmental about whatever people choose to do, and I think th government should stay the f_u_kc out of all of it and leave it to the individual to decide.
The cultural narrative may indeed be set because this study and that study have shown cigarettes cause cancer and marijuana does no such thing. One study says marijuana is bad, another two say it isn't, and three more say data is inconclusive. Whatever. Point being, our culture right now is generally cool with pot and generally uncool with cigarettes, so smoking the former is cool and smoking the latter is not.
WHAT_the_f_u_kc_EVER.
Simply a commentary on the sifting winds of the cultural narrative, justified or not. Take sex and violence in media. Violence used to be much cooler than it is now, while sex was less cool than it is now. Things change in the cultural narrative all the time. Pot is more cool than it used to be, cigarettes are less cool. I am a champion of people doing whatever the hell they please, so long as they are not harming, obligating or otherwise initiating force against others. You want to smoke a carton of cigarettes or a pound of weed, be my guest, just don't blow the smoke in my face, since I gave all that up a long time ago. I am not for making one legal and the other illegal. I think in a country where the totally destructive tobacco and alcohol products are all perfectly legal, marijuana not being legal makes exactly zero sense in any possible form of argument, but we also have higher penalties for white collar crimes against the bureaucracy than we have for aggravated assault and rape. America is freaking insane and pretty severely retarded.
But pot is cool and cigarettes aren't because our culture picks and chooses what is cool and what isn't on a whim and always has. No need to be defensive folks, nor to validate why you prefer one or the other or both. Smoke/ingest whatever the hell you want as often as you want. I am forever champion of individuals doing their own thing.
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