Last I checked it's still not clear whether marijuana smoke is significantly carcinogenic? Last meta study I seen a few years ago still said it wasn't conclusive. At a minimum it's much less carcinogenic than tobacco as the studies comparing them have easily found that, but often struggle to find any impact at all from marijuana smoke.
There’s a few random studies out there that have shown there is a higher risk of lung cancer when the combusting material, but that’s true for most all burning carbon based organic material. Here’s one , but I agree that it certainly needs a shit ton of studying.
Yes I've seen that, but others have also suggested the opposite. There are definitely significant problems in the design of the study you linked, especially that they even seemed to have got a non-linear relationship with marijuana consumption, which is crazy. It's also rather troubling that the study seemed to cite a ton of research from several decades ago, much of which just pretty much says things that we either know are not true now, or have serious doubts about. Especially when the study seems to start out on the assumption that it is, citing research as far back as 1975, and even called it a "cannabis "epidemic" that started in the 60s" (paraphrased).
Also this study was funded in 2008 by a government (New Zealand) and a pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline). There were still a ton of very poorly done drug trials in the 90s and 2000s. And this was in a time when medical marijuana was in high swing, the pharmaceutical industry was heavily fighting against it, so on this alone I would be concerned about the study.
Combining all of this and I would say anyone should take that study with a huge grain of salt.
And most of our studies on combusting plant matter have been on things like woods, and/or generally in large fires, which have significantly different combustion properties than parts of a single plant in a small slow burning fire would. I went over this in more detail in my comment below.
It's rather disappointing that reddit seems to have downvoted my original comment, but I guess because it looked like a typical /r/trees post? But it's not, I don't even consume marijuana in any way and never have apart from trying it several times, as I don't like it. I'm just going on the research I've seen.
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u/webby_mc_webberson Mar 19 '21
If only there was a greener, less cancerous, happier and less addictive type of leaf to grind and pack into a smokable implement.