When I was ten years old, I sat by my grandmothers chair side as she received yet another round of chemo therapy. She told me how she wasn’t aware of the diseases cigarettes caused. During the 1940’s, her prime smoking years, the direct causality between smoking and lung cancer was unthought of. As we learned in class, scientist like E. Cuyler Hammond had made vast improvements throughout the 50’s showing that tobacco smokers were more likely to die than non tobacco smokers, yet their new found evidence could still only be considered a correlation. Even Ernst Ludwig Wynder’s publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association, with 684 proven cases, was still only considered to be a correlation! This 1950’s post did decrease the number of smokers in America from 50% of the population to 20% of the population, yet it wasn’t until 1975 when “The Smoking Beagles” proved to Americans that smoking in fact did cause Lung Cancer.

Even with the amount of improvements and evidence that cigarettes are a direct causality to lung cancer, it still took experiment after experiment and a numerous amount of years to fully prove the causality to be true. So is todays weed smoking deja vu? Is it possible that weed can cause the same degree of bodily harm as tobacco smoking? Heavy marijuana smokers typically inhale a larger amount of smoke for a longer period in comparison to a heavy tobacco smoker. This means the weed smokers have more tar in their lower respiratory track than heavy tobacco smokers. (http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1513/AnnalsATS.201212-127FR). It has also been acknowledged that repetitive weed smokers have developed diseases such as chronic bronchitis.

Dr. Donald Tashkin, a professor at UCLA, has been studying the relationship between marijuana and lung cancer for over 30 years. In 2005, he announced his new finding that despite what he initially thought, there was not a direct correlation between weed and lung cancer (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html). Though he does hypothesize that the consumption of weed is still harmful to the human body, through his case study of 1200 people, he is confident that marijuana and lung cancer are not associated with each other.

Though I am not sure of the implications weed has on the body today, I believe that it will be considered hazardous in the future. The inhalation of a significant amount of smoke can only lead to damages in the lungs and respiratory system. I do believe as time continues and science evolves even more, there will be new found research that specifies the impairment of weed to the human body.