Is the Marijuana Movement like the Tobacco Movement?
Marijuana legalization has been growing immensely in the United States. Experts are now worried that public health battles that were fought against tobacco companies are going to come back into play, but this time against the marijuana industry.
Authors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote, “given the lessons learned from the 20th-century rise of another legal addictive substance, tobacco, we believe that such an industry could transform marijuana and its effects on public health.”
Unexpectedly, people arguing both for and against the legalization of marijuana have been comparing the substance to tobacco. Many of the arguments from both sides cancel each other. However, when one looks into the nature of both marijuana and tobacco products, there are strong similarities in both that can get rid of the unclear areas within the debates. Some argue that marijuana is not as dangerous as tobacco, but a professor of medicine at the University of California Stanton Glantz has his own opinion.
“If you look at marijuana smoke, it’s not terribly different from cigarette smoke. In some ways, it’s worse, and in some ways it’s not as bad, but overall, it’s smoke,” Glantz stated. “So you would expect long-term exposure to marijuana smoke to have very similar effects to long-term exposure to tobacco smoke.”
Lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, and other types of cancer have all been connected to tobacco already. Marijuana, on the other hand, has some mixed results. Some experiments will show that marijuana is as bad as cigarette smoke while others will show the opposite. One issue with these studies is that most people who smoke marijuana also smoke cigarettes, so much of the data presented may be skewed. However, it looks as if that will change due to the fact that marijuana is overtaking cigarettes in popularity and use.
“Twenty years from now we’ll probably have a cohort of pure marijuana users and we’ll have a pretty good idea of exactly what diseases it’s causing,” Glantz said.
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