Chest Pains

[LIP]

The healthiest way to get high, is to eat it. Next vapes... and then so on. Eating is fine.. although it's more potent, so a normal joints worth can turn into a very strong high..

LIP Reviewed by LIP on 12-11-2006. Chest Pains Hey Everyone: Iv'e been smoking for about 2 years now, but this past year Iv'e just about done it everyday, 80% bongs 20% blunts. (Mostly Kush) How often do you guys take breaks?? How long for each break? Ive been getting chest pains lately and Ive been coughing a lot. Any Input would be great! Rating: 5

[Captain Hanks]

Captain, you can think what you want. But first, do a Google search on cannabis and lung irritation. Then another on cannabis and asthma. Also cannabis and pulmonary inflammation. You'll find more references than you listed above proving just the opposite. You'll also want to visit the emergency rooms and pulmonary wards and respiratory therapists who worked with heavy cannabis smokers.

The deal about cannabis is this. THC is a wonderful bronchodilator and expectorant. But smoked cannabis itself is harsh and irritating and contains a lot more than just THC. Ask smokers who use it heavily. Ask me, who smoked it very lightly this past summer. It aggravated my asthma to a significant degree. This is why many savvy cannabis users, particularly those who use it medicinally, choose to vaporize it or eat it.

Like I said, you're welcome to your own opinion. I'm basing mine on what Iv'e read--and I've read a lot--and on my own experience and the experiences I've read from many heavy smokers here. More people need to understand the not-so-subtle differences between the great benefits of the isolated THC and CBD active compounds in cannabis and the potentially very irritating effects of inhaled burning cannabis smoke.

Government Doublespeak

Since 1976, our federal government (e.g., NIDA, NIH, DEA*, and Action), police sponsored groups (like DARE*), and special interest groups (like PDFA*) have proclaimed to public, press, and parent groups alike that they have "absolute evidence" of the shocking negative effects of marijuana smoking.

* National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Drug Enforcement Agency, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, Partnership for a Drug Free America. All subsequent researchers found Heath's marijuana findings to be of no value, because carbon monoxide poisoning and other factors were totally left out.

When U.S. government sponsored research prior to 1976 indicated that cannabis was harmless or beneficial, the methodology of how each study was done was always presented in detail in the reports; e.g., read The Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana (1976) and you will see exactly what the methodology of each medical study was.

However, when our government bureaucrats deliberately sponsored negative marijuana research, time and time again Playboy magazine, NORML, High Times, etc. had to sue under the new Freedom of Information Act to find out the actual laboratory methodology these "experiments" employed.

What they found was shocking.

Lung Damage Studies

The Hype:

More Harmful Than Tobacco

According to the American Lung Association, cigarettes and tobacco smoking related diseases kill more than 430,000 Americans every year. Fifty million Americans smoke, and 3,000 teens start each day. The Berkeley carcinogenic tar studies of the late 1970s concluded that "marijuana is one-and-a-half times more carcinogenic than tobacco."

The Fact:

Not One Documented Case of Cancer

There are lung irritants involved in any smoke. Cannabis smoke causes mild irritation to the large airways of the lungs. Symptoms disappear when smoking is discontinued.

However, unlike tobacco smoke, cannabis smoke does not cause any changes in the small airways, the area where tobacco smoke causes long term and permanent damage. Additionally, a tobacco smoker will smoke 20 to 60 cigarettes a day, while a heavy marijuana smoker may smoke five to seven joints a day, even less when potent high-quality flower tops are available.

While tens of millions of Americans smoke pot regularly, cannabis has never caused a known case of lung cancer as of December 1997, according to America's foremost lung expert, Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA. He considers the biggest health risk to the lungs would be a person smoking 16 or more "large" spliffs a day of leaf/bud because of the hypoxia of too much smoke and not enough oxygen.

Tashkin feels there is no danger for anyone to worry about potentiating emphysema "in any way" by the use of marijuana totally the opposite of tobacco.

Cannabis is a complex, highly evolved plant. There are some 400 compounds in its smoke. Of these, 60 are presently known to have therapeutic value.

Cannabis may also be eaten, entirely avoiding the irritating effects of smoke. However, four times more of the active ingredients of smoked cannabis are absorbed by the human body than when the same amount is eaten. And the prohibition inflated price of black market cannabis, combined with harsh penalties for cultivation, prevent most persons from being able to afford the luxury of a less efficient, though healthier, means of ingestion.

Lab Studies Fail to Reflect the Real World

Studies have proven that many of the carcinogens in cannabis can be removed by using a water pipe system. Our government omitted this information and its significance when speaking to the press. At the same time politicians outlawed the sale of water pipes, labeling them "drug paraphernalia."

How Rumors Get Started

In 1976, Dr. Tashkin, M.D., UCLA, sent a written report to Dr. Gabriel Nahas at the Rheims, France, Conference on "Potential Cannabis Medical Dangers." That report became the most sensationalized story to come out of this negative world conference on cannabis.

This surprised Tashkin, who had sent the report to the Rheims conference as an afterthought.

What Tashkin reported to the Rheims conference was that only one of the 29 pulmonary areas of the human lung studied the large air passageway Did he find marijuana to be more of an irritant (by 15 times) than tobacco. This figure is insignificant, however, since Tashkin also notes that tobacco has almost no effect on this area. Therefore, 15 times almost nothing is still almost nothing. in any event, cannabis has a positive or neutral effect in most other areas of the lung. (See Chapter 7, "Therapeutic Uses of Cannabis.")

(Tashkin, Dr. Donald, UCLA studies, 1969-83; UCLA Pulmonary Studies, 1969-95.)

Afterwards in 1977, the U.S. government resumed funding for ongoing cannabis pulmonary studies which it had cut two years earlier when Tashkin reported encouraging therapeutic results with marijuana/lung studies. But now the government limited funding only to research to the large air passageway.

We have interviewed Dr. Tashkin dozens of times. In 1986 I asked him about an article he was preparing for the New England Journal of Medicine, indicating that cannabis smoke caused as many or more pre-cancerous lesions as tobacco in "equal" amounts.

Most people do not realize, nor are the media told, that any tissue abnormality (abrasion, eruption, or even redness) is called a pre-cancerous lesion. Unlike lesions caused by tobacco, the THC-related lesions contain no radioactivity.

We asked Tashkin how many persons had gone on to get lung cancer in these or any other studies of long-term cannabis-only smokers (Rastas, Coptics, etc.)

Sitting in his UCLA laboratory, Dr. Tashkin looked at me and said, "That's the strange part. So far no one we've studied has gone on to get lung cancer."

"Was this reported to the press?"

"Well, it's in the article," Dr. Tashkin said. "But no one in the press even asked. They just assumed the worst." His answer to us was still that not one single case of lung cancer in someone who only smoked cannabis, has ever been reported. It should be remembered that he and other doctors had predicted 20 years ago, their certainty that hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers would by now (1997) have developed lung cancer.

Another Fact:

Emphysema Suffers Benefit

During a later interview, Tashkin congratulated me on the tip I'd given him that marijuana used for emphysema produced good results among persons we knew.

He laughed at me originally, because he had presumed that marijuana aggravated emphysema, but after reviewing his evidence found that, except in the rarest of cases, marijuana was actually of great benefit to emphysema suffers due to the opening and dilation of the bronchial passages.

And so the relief reported to us by cannabis smoking emphysema patients was confirmed.

Marijuana smoke is not unique in its benefits to the lungs. Yerba Santa, Colt's foot, Horehound, and other herbs have traditionally been smoked to help the lungs.

Tobacco and its associated dangers have so prejudiced persons against "smoking" that most persons believe cannabis smoking to be as or more dangerous than tobacco. With research banned, these public health and safety facts are not readily available.

In December 1997, we asked Dr. Tashkin again, and he unequivocably stated that "marijuana does not cause or potentiate emphysema in any way." In addition, there has not been one case of lung cancer ever attributed to smoking cannabis.

. . . And So On

Most of the anti-marijuana literature we have examined does not cite as much as one single source for us to review. Others only refer to DEA or NIDA. The few studies we have been able to track down usually end up being anecdotal case histories, artificial groupings of data, or otherwise lacking controls and never replicated.

Reports of breast enlargement, obesity, addiction, and the like all remain unsubstantiated, and are given little credence by the scientific community. Other reports, like the temporary reduction in sperm count, are statistically insignificant to the general public, yet get blown far out of proportion when presented by the media. Still others, like the handful of throat tumors in the Sacramento area and the high rate of injuries reported in a Baltimore trauma unit are isolated clusters that run contrary to all other statistics and have never been replicated.

The spurious results of Heath, Nahas, and the pregnant mice and monkey studies at Temple University and UC Davis (where they injected mice with synthetic third-cousin analogues of THC) are now discredited in the body of scientific and medical literature.

Though these studies are not used in scientific discourse, mountains of DEA and pharmaceutical company-sponsored literature about the long-term possible effects of these metabolites on the brain and reproduction still goes to parent groups as if they were brand new studies. This disinformation is still very much alive in U.S. government, DEA, DARE, and PDFA reports.

(Read the 1982 N.I.H.; the National Academy of Science's evaluation on past studies; and the Costa Rica report, 1980.) No Harm to Human Brain or Intelligence Hemp has been used in virtually all societies since time immemorial as a work motivator and to highlight and renew creative energies.

Myth: Marijuana is a significant cause of emergency room admissions.
Fact: The U.S. government reports that marijuana-related emergency room episodes are increasing. The government counts an emergency room admission as a marijuana-related episode if the word marijuana appears anywhere in the medical record. If a patient tests positive for marijuana because he/she used marijuana several days before the incident occurred, if a drunk driver admits he/she also smoked some marijuana, or if anyone involved in the incident merely possessed marijuana, the government counts the emergency room admission as a "marijuana-related episode." Less than 0.2% of all emergency room admissions are "marijuana related." This so-called marijuana-causes-emergencies statistic was carefully crafted by the government to make marijuana appear dangerous.