Nullis
Moderator
There are too many complications with so called 'studies' linking cannabis with any kinds of cancer, due to the drug being illegal, confounding factors and quality controls. This makes it easier for 'scientists' doing research say for NIDA to set the 'study' up in a way that is more likely to show cannabis in a negative light. You want a study to 'prove' that cannabis kills brain cells, you take a group of monkeys and force them to inhale more cannabis smoke in six minutes than your average human ever could during his or her lifetime.
Back when universities in the United States were doing cannabis research funded by the government, unless they got the results they were looking for none of it would see the light of day. It happens all the time; they want a study to show that cannabis does something horrible but instead come out with the opposite results. This is probably the very reason why there is no cannabis research in the US anymore.
So what do we know? Well, I know (among other things) that half a million cigarette smokers die annually. That's half a million bodies, per year, as evidence that there is a direct link between tobacco (or whatever is within it), lung cancer and other diseases. Where are the bodies that directly link cannabis to any death? We've been smoking the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. I am also fairly certain that people used to smoke tobacco and there wasn't such significant rates of disease attributed to it.
I know for a fact that smokeless tobacco causes cancer too, and I also know that radioactive compounds like polonium 210 are present within mainstream tobacco smoke. Studies on laboratory animals have shown that inhaled polonium 210 is the only component of cigarette smoke that will cause lung cancer by itself.
When inhaled polonium 210 will form deposits in the lungs, which will become more concentrated with repeated inhalations. Being the highly unstable radioactive isotope that it is, it is constantly firing off alpha particles (slowly but surely damaging tissues) until stabilizing itself as lead-206. It has a half-life of about 138 days, which is the time that it takes for a given sample to have decayed into lead-206. If you're a cigarette smoker, however, you're constantly inhaling polonium 210 (and other isotopes) and thus constantly depositing more of those isotopes in your lung tissues.
Tobacco leaves and smoke in the US also contain traces of lead 210, another radioactive isotope which is actually an eventual precursor to polonium 210. It has a much longer half-life than polonium 210: taking 22 years for half a sample to decay into bismuth 210. Half of that intermediate isotope will have decayed into polonium 210 after just five days, and of course half of that polonium 210 will have decayed into the stable lead 206 after 138 days.
And guess what: it is accepted that when a smoker has successfully quit, after 25 years they will have the same risk of developing lung cancer as a non-smoker.
Here is what the EPA has to say about it: http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/sources/tobacco.html
Back when universities in the United States were doing cannabis research funded by the government, unless they got the results they were looking for none of it would see the light of day. It happens all the time; they want a study to show that cannabis does something horrible but instead come out with the opposite results. This is probably the very reason why there is no cannabis research in the US anymore.
So what do we know? Well, I know (among other things) that half a million cigarette smokers die annually. That's half a million bodies, per year, as evidence that there is a direct link between tobacco (or whatever is within it), lung cancer and other diseases. Where are the bodies that directly link cannabis to any death? We've been smoking the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. I am also fairly certain that people used to smoke tobacco and there wasn't such significant rates of disease attributed to it.
I know for a fact that smokeless tobacco causes cancer too, and I also know that radioactive compounds like polonium 210 are present within mainstream tobacco smoke. Studies on laboratory animals have shown that inhaled polonium 210 is the only component of cigarette smoke that will cause lung cancer by itself.
When inhaled polonium 210 will form deposits in the lungs, which will become more concentrated with repeated inhalations. Being the highly unstable radioactive isotope that it is, it is constantly firing off alpha particles (slowly but surely damaging tissues) until stabilizing itself as lead-206. It has a half-life of about 138 days, which is the time that it takes for a given sample to have decayed into lead-206. If you're a cigarette smoker, however, you're constantly inhaling polonium 210 (and other isotopes) and thus constantly depositing more of those isotopes in your lung tissues.
http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/polonium.pdf
Tobacco leaves and smoke in the US also contain traces of lead 210, another radioactive isotope which is actually an eventual precursor to polonium 210. It has a much longer half-life than polonium 210: taking 22 years for half a sample to decay into bismuth 210. Half of that intermediate isotope will have decayed into polonium 210 after just five days, and of course half of that polonium 210 will have decayed into the stable lead 206 after 138 days.
And guess what: it is accepted that when a smoker has successfully quit, after 25 years they will have the same risk of developing lung cancer as a non-smoker.
Here is what the EPA has to say about it: http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/sources/tobacco.html