Cannabis and Tobacco

"According to the stepping-stone theory of addiction, we increase risk relative to surviving risk. So when as a young teen smoker I figured out that there wasn’t an immediate deterioration to my health, it was easy enough to think that the warnings about drugs, especially dope, given out by adults were exaggerated as well. But we all have different stories. I know plenty of people who have hardly ever smoked a cigarette in their lives but are addicted to nicotine just the same because of smoking tobacco joints from an early age.

Smoking tobacco joints is a huge problem here in the UK, as in many other countries. The cocktail of the two drugs is deadly; not only because of the way we smoke it, holding the smoke deep in our lungs to extract the maximum value from every unfiltered toke, but also the way that, for a tobacco joint smoker, the cravings for nicotine and cannabis become confused and make nicotine addiction a much harder habit to break than for the average cigarette smoker who has never smoked dope.

As ever with cannabis, there are conflicting health reports. Recent studies at the Harvard Cancer Center in Boston have revealed that human lung cancer tumours grew less than half as fast in mice that were injected with moderate doses of THC. This isn’t exactly great news for American parents trying to warn their children about the dangers of marijuana, and dope smokers generally need zero excuses to defend their hobby. It seems unlikely, however, that health professionals are going to start encouraging us all to smoke cannabis to protect ourselves from lung cancer.

At the other end of the scare spectrum, there are continuing studies showing that smoking cannabis and tobacco together, not even necessarily in the same cigarette, increases the risk of contracting chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (surely as nasty as it sounds) by a third more than smoking tobacco alone. Emphysema is another concern. The respiratory department at St Mary’s Hospital in London is finding more and more people are contracting this disease in their 30s, presenting lungs that look like they belong to a 65- year-old. The common link? Tobacco joints."