Does methodology matter to no one.

[Baby Lee]

Saw this all over the net today and finally clicked on it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012...1&f=1128&sc=tw

Smoking a joint a week for up to seven years doesn't hurt lung function, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. They came up with that number after following more than 5,000 people for 20 years. The results were just published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.


In fact, those occasional pot smokers actually had improvements in some measurements of lung function. That may be due in part to the stretching involved in the deep tokes typical of marijuana use. By contrast, both past and present cigarette smokers had impaired lung function.

But the pot smokers didn't get a completely clean bill of health. Heavy marijuana users, which the study defined as smoking more than 20 times a month, did see a decline in lung capacity. But that's after exposure to more than 10 "joint-years," which the scientists calculated as a joint a day for a decade. That's a fair amount of weed.

WTF - I don't know a thing about pot use, ie how strong your reaction is or how often the average person consumes. But this comparison to smoking is REDICKULUS. Doctors measure cigarette smoking density in PACK years, ie, '20 cigarette' years. They're talking about heavy use of marijuana being measured in joint years, and moderate use as a joint per week.

You're talking, for a 2PPD smoker, a 40x to 280x consumption density. I'd submit that people who consume 280 ounces of soda, heck water, per day would have more health problems than those who consumed 1 ounce of Everclear per day.