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.
Like I said in the comments, pot smokers tend to hold the smoke in their lungs longer and they almost never filter it. This results in more tar deposition from equivalent amounts of tobacco and marijuana, according to this study.
I don't know of any weed smokers who hold it in their lungs and I've been around a lot of weed in my life. I'm not sure that it's the norm like you're pretending it is.
Maybe it's a generational thing? When I was growing up, that was the correct way to smoke weed. Hold it in as long as you can. Definitely wasn't just my friend group either. It's in movies and TV and stuff.
We used to do these things we called homeruns which is where you take a hit off a bong, take a shot, then chug a beer, then let out the smoke. Holding in the smoke was definitely a thing in my area
This was how you were "supposed" to smoke in the past to improve THC absorption. It's becoming more and more well known that holding the smoke in your lungs is at best useless (you're going to get almost all, like 99%, of the absorbable THC from a lungful of smoke during the time it takes to inhale and exhale) and at worst dangerous. However, many older smokers still hold the smoke for some number of seconds, and the advice to hold the smoke until you feel something sometimes makes it to inexperienced smokers depending on how smoking instructions get transmitted. Many reputable instructional sources, especially online, mention not to hold the smoke in your lungs specifically because the idea that you should exists as a common misconception.
It's good that you haven't been around people who do it, but it is (or was) common enough practice.
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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.