Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Marijuana Healthier Than Cigarettes

“…those who occasionally smoked marijuana as compared to smoking cigarettes had less damages to their lungs than the participants who smoked cigarettes.”

Alcohol and tobacco use have been legal in our societies for many years now. marijuana use, though, is out lawed and sometimes seen as a taboo. Yet many persons who support marijuana use strongly contend that alcohol and cigarettes use are statistically more damaging and deadly than use of marijuana.
Marijuana activists seem to have been given a shot in the arm from the results of a new study just released in the
Journal of the American Medical Association. Over the last twenty years, the study worked with some five thousand Americans who engaged in smoking marijuana and smoking cigarettes. The striking results show that those who occasionally smoked marijuana as compared to smoking cigarettes had less damages to their lungs than the participants who smoked cigarettes.
I can just imagine that marijuana defenders would be all delighted with this new study; however, this news has to be accepted with a “spliff” of caution. Yes, smoking little amounts of marijuana is not as dangerous to your health as smoking cigarettes. This is true if one smokes marijuana in moderation about once per week.
Even before this new study was released, it was already scientifically proven that marijuana as a substance does have some chemicals that are actually good for your health. For example, marijuana has proven to be a good reliever of pains. There are some four hundred or so chemicals in the marijuana plant; however, just about twenty-five per cent of these chemicals are good for the body. So the problem lies with the majority of chemicals. No one can say how these “bad” chemicals will affect the smoker, and the effect on no two smokers is the same.
According to the Journal persons who smoked marijuana on a daily basis were in just as bad a position where their lungs were concerned as those who indulged in cigarette smoking. So we should not take this new study as a license to proliferate even more the use of marijuana.
Maybe what can be done is that the pharmaceutical industry can extract the beneficial chemicals out of the marijuana plant and offer these chemicals for public use. Or, at the very least, step up the public education campaign about the good and bad chemicals/benefits from marijuana use.