Health News About Pot Smoking

First the unsurprising news: smoking pot can be bad for your gums. And now the slightly surprising news: it doesn’t appear to be bad for anything else. Researchers at Duke University who studied nearly 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 38 has found that people who smoked marijuana for up to 20 years have more gum disease, but otherwise do not show worse physical health than non-smokers. A Duke news release reports that researchers looked at a dozen measures of physical health, including lung function, systemic inflammation and several measures of metabolic syndrome, including waist circumference, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, glucose control and body mass index, and found no differences in marijuana users and non-users. That contrasts with the findings of studies on tobacco smokers, who were found to have gum disease as well as reduced lung function, systemic inflammation and indicators of poorer metabolic health. But wait. Study leader Madeline Meier, an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, has this advice to pot smokers who think they’re home free: “We don’t want people to think, ‘Hey, marijuana can’t hurt me,’ because other studies on this same sample of New Zealanders have shown that marijuana use is associated with increased risk of psychotic illness, IQ decline and downward socioeconomic mobility.”