[Anecdotes] The Chronic 2012

Maybe Dr. Dre had it right when he, Snoop Dogg, and Nate Dogg rapped: “Smoke weed every day.”

I wouldn’t necessarily extrapolate the recent study in JAMA as advocating smoking marijuana on a daily basis. However, there is a lot of buzz hovering through the air today about the study.  A layman’s overview is available in the New York Times. A more thorough reporting by Aaron Caroll at the Inicidental Economist  describes the new evidence that mild to moderate marijuana smoking (in contrast to tobacco smoking) does not adversely effect lung function. The Incidental Economist also points out in “Tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana: One of these things is not like the other” that:

“Tobacco? Adversely impacts lung function, and perfectly legal. Binge drinking of alcohol? Common, dangerous, and costly to society. Also, totally legal. Marijuana? No impact on lung function, and known beneficial effects. Usually illegal. I’m not advocating for prohibition or for making tobacco illegal. But I would like someone to offer some good evidence as to why one of these things is not like the other.”

Although Caroll stops short of advocating banning tobacco, I don’t. In fact, in , that is exactly what I recommended given the evidence that tobacco smoking has been proven to be deadly (we’ve known this since 1964). Of course the United States has tried this with alcohol and that didn’t work out too well. So how likely is it that the United States will prohibit tobacco? Or alternatively, how likely is it that marijuana will be de-criminalized?

In an answer to Caroll’s question, why is marijuana illegal while tobacco and alcohol are perfectly legitimate? Politics. And the fact that tobacco, coupled with a “free” labor force, took a strangle-hold on the American economy in the early 1600s. Unfortunately, politics and science do not often agree. It seems that many of the physicians out there talking about this study understand this fact. As my friend Dr. Tyese Gaines of theGrio tweeted about the study: “Always suspected this. I hardly see health issues from weed.”

I have not seen any either. But I see complications from cigarettes and alcohol almost every single time I walk into the Emergecy Department.