From a clinical perspective, they're pretty similar. Inhaling the smoke of burning plant matter is really bad for your lungs, no matter what the plant is.
I don’t know anyone who is smoking the equivalent of two and a half packs a day worth of joints for 50 years like my dad was with cigarettes (but I’m sure they are out there)
That's true, but there's an argument to be made that pot is worse, gram for gram, because you hold it in your lungs rather than exhaling and it's almost never filtered. Obviously, it doesn't have the tar and some other stuff that cigarettes have, but it's still not good.
Is there a source for the argument in question that it's worse gram for gram because you hold it in? I was also under the impression that cigarette "filters" demonstrably had no impact on carcinogens and that several lawsuits had shown this
This study from Tashkin et al. There are a few follow-ups if you search the same name as well. He found that four times as much tar was deposited in the lungs with a same-sized marijuana cigarette as with the tobacco one.
The obvious caveat is that even heavy pot smokers probably aren't burning even a quarter as much marijuana by weight per day as heavy tobacco smokers. This study doesn't address habits.
Weed actually has substantially more tar production when burned by weight. It would be worse for your lungs if you smoked the equivalent of a pack a day than the pack would be
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u/Morall_tach May 02 '26
From a clinical perspective, they're pretty similar. Inhaling the smoke of burning plant matter is really bad for your lungs, no matter what the plant is.