Marijuana — Can It Help Prevent Lung Cancer?

I know it seems counterintuitive, but there were a number of initial studies done a long time ago that showed a good deal of evidence that inhaled cannabis, and this is really strange, since you’re inhaling smoke — did not only not cause cancer but in a small to moderate way helped prevent it. Which I know makes absolutely no sense, but I did read about it — it was in THE WEEK Magazine, years ago, in print — I do not have the link. The article had a picture of Cheech & Chong with the caption, “At least they won’t get cancer…” underneath it.

However, don’t worry about your common sense, because the prevailing wisdom is still that inhaling marijuana smoke is bad for you and contributes to lung cancer. The best sources are unclear on it, but still advise not smoking anything. Frankly. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to realize inhaling smoke into your lungs is usually not a good idea.

Out of curiosity, since I couldn’t find that original article and was getting conflicting information (and I trust THE WEEK, it’s one of the few sources I actually do trust these days, though even that digest is losing impartiality), I looked up some studies recently on whether or not there is any real truth to the notion that marijuana may aid in retarding and preventing lung cancer. There are, in fact, several scientific studies backing it up. Here’s one of them.

Here’s an article from 2008 from ABCNews about the possible lung-cancer fighting aspects of marijuana.

Over at WebMD, they discusses the conflicting data — marijuana causes lung cancer, but marijuana somehow prevents lung cancer (when inhaled).

I don’t really think smoking anything is that great for your health — smoking marijuana can give you breathing problems at the very least and so on — but it does apparently coat your lungs with some sort of resin that seems, these studies claim, in early trials (especially on animals) does not cause cancer, and that, at best, actually fights lung cancer somehow by coating the lungs with certain chemicals that fight tumor growth and actually program the cancer cell to die, which the cell is usually is pre-programmed not to do (see: apoptosis — death of a cell — for some reason cancer cells usually don’t have that activated, somehow marijuana unblocks the apoptosis center and can thus kill a cancer cell off).

Just like any other thing I post on here, I am not telling you to go get high right now so you don’t get cancer. That’s idiotic. Smoke marijuana, don’t smoke marijuana, I don’t care; it’s your business. It’s just that I was long convinced marijuana caused lung cancer, until I started reading that it maybe it didn’t about…it was a while in the past…fifteen years ago? — when I read that article in THE WEEK. And it’s still debatable. I think maybe the goal would be to get the active chemicals into your lungs without smoking anything, in the end.

You can Google further and draw your own conclusions.