
Folks who smoke weed along with cigarettes are doing serious damage to their lungs, a new study warns. People who do both are 12 times more likely to develop emphysema than nonsmokers, due to the damage they’re doing to the lung’s air sacs, researchers report. “There is a common public misconception that marijuana smoking is not harmful,” said researcher Dr. Jessie Kang, a cardiothoracic radiologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. “With our study, we show that there are physical effects of marijuana smoking on the lungs and that cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking may have a combined damaging effect on the lungs,” Kang added. Even though weed is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world, little is known about the effects of smoking cannabis on a person’s lung health, researchers noted. Tons of research has linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer, emphysema and COPD, but “currently not much research exists on the effects of marijuana smoking on the lungs,” Kang noted. For their study, Kang and her colleagues examined chest CT images of four patient groups – nonsmokers, cigarette smokers, marijuana smokers and combined tobacco and weed smokers. Weed smokers included in the study had toked at least four times a month for at least two years, researchers said. In addition to increased risk of emphysema, combined weed and… read on > read on >