Weed vs. Tobacco: Which Is Worse for Your Health?

Smoking anything hurts your lungs, but the evidence points to tobacco as the more harmful of the two: cigarettes are tied to cancer, heart disease and COPD and kill more than 8 million people a year, while the link between smoking weed and lung cancer is far less clear. That doesn't make weed smoke harmless: it carries tar and carcinogens too, and the harmful effects of smoking it include a higher risk of chronic bronchitis.

The tobacco-vs-weed debate comes up constantly, and as cannabis gains acceptance and legal status in more places, the question of how safe it is by comparison keeps getting louder. Understanding the potential harms of each is key to making informed choices, so here's how the risks of smoking cigarettes and smoking weed stack up, for both physical and mental health.

Smoking weed vs. smoking tobacco: the effects

Breathing in any kind of smoke affects your lungs, whether it comes from weed, tobacco or a campfire. Burning plant material releases carcinogens and toxins, and inhaling them raises your risk of respiratory disease.

But is there any real difference between smoking cigarettes all day and regularly smoking weed, whether in joints, pipes or bongs?

Before we get into the research suggesting that compounds in cannabis might offset some of smoking's damage, let's look at how smoking each of these exposes your body to dangerous residues.

Tobacco: a carcinogen-packed habit

It's no secret that cigarettes are loaded with nasty, harmful chemicals. Tobacco smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals, and at least 250 of them are known to be harmful. They include:

• Arsenic
• Benzene
• Cadmium
• Chromium
• Nickel
• Formaldehyde

Regular exposure to these substances damages nearly every organ in the body, causing oxidative stress, inflammation and DNA damage that shows up as a long list of diseases, including:

• Many types of cancer
• Heart disease
• Aneurysm
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• Diabetes
• Arthritis

Despite all that, millions of people around the world keep smoking. Nicotine, tobacco's active ingredient, is addictive, both mentally and physically.

On top of craving its physical effects, people get hooked on the ritual of smoking itself. The result? More than 8 million deaths a year worldwide.

Side effects of smoking weed: different, not better

Plenty of weed fans reject the idea that it can harm your health at all. "It's totally natural," they say. But that take usually comes from wishful thinking, not from science.

The truth is that smoking weed also exposes your body to dangerous chemicals. Here are a few facts most stoners don't want to hear:

• Weed smokers tend to inhale more deeply than tobacco smokers, exposing themselves to more tar.
• Weed smoke is linked to chronic bronchitis and damages the cells lining your airways.
• Smoking weed may raise the risk of air pockets forming between the lungs and the chest wall (pneumothorax).
• Poorly grown or badly cured weed can expose your lungs to fungi like Aspergillus.
• Weed smoke contains higher levels of certain carcinogens than tobacco smoke, including 50% more benzopyrene and 75% more benzanthracene.

Despite these clear risks, research suggests weed smoke may be less dangerous than tobacco smoke. Why? The answer may lie in the unique chemical compounds found in cannabis flowers.

Weed vs. tobacco: comparing the risks

Both tobacco and weed carry real risks when smoked, but they differ significantly in chemical makeup and in the risks tied to them. Here are a few key points:

1. What's in tobacco and weed:
   • Tobacco contains nicotine, which is highly addictive and drives the habit behind many of smoking's health harms.
   • Cannabis contains THC and other cannabinoids, which don't just get you high but also interact with the body's endocannabinoid system.
2. Long-term health effects:
   • Smoking tobacco is directly linked to a wide range of chronic diseases, like lung cancer, heart disease and COPD.
   • Smoking weed can cause respiratory problems, but research on a direct link to lung cancer and other chronic diseases is less conclusive.
3. Other ways to consume:
   • Unlike tobacco, cannabis can be used in lots of ways that don't involve inhaling smoke, like vaporizers, edibles and oils, which may cut down some of the risks of smoking.

In short, smoking weed and smoking tobacco both carry significant health risks, because you're inhaling toxic and cancer-causing substances. But the nature and degree of those risks can differ between the two.

It's crucial to be aware of these risks and to consider other ways of consuming that keep the potential harm to your health down.

What are the alternatives to smoking weed?

Some research points to a possible protective effect from cannabinoids, but the risk of developing a respiratory illness from smoking weed is still very real. Smoking isn't the only option, though. Here are two solid alternatives.

Vaping

Vaping weed exposes the buds or concentrates to much lower temperatures. Instead of burning plant material, a vaporizer heats cannabinoids, terpenes and other plant compounds to their boiling points, releasing them as vapor.

Vaping carries less risk than smoking, but it can still have a negative impact on your heart and lungs.

Edibles

Edibles take your lungs out of the equation completely. With these products, THC and other cannabinoids travel through the digestive tract and get processed by the liver before reaching the brain. That's why edibles take longer to kick in and their effects last much longer.

Should you worry about the side effects of smoking weed?

Spending your life worrying about every decision will only suck some of the joy out of things. You only live once. If you genuinely enjoy smoking weed and feel it helps you in other ways, that's your call.

But make it an informed one. Living once also means you probably want to stick around as long as possible. Smoking weed exposes your body to harmful chemicals and raises your risk of certain diseases. If you want to keep the risks down, try vaping your herb or making some edibles with it.

The bottom line

Smoking isn't the only way to enjoy what cannabis has to offer. Alternatives like vaping and edibles can deliver a satisfying experience while keeping health risks down. Making informed choices lets you enjoy weed more safely and look after your well-being for the long haul.

Do cannabinoids protect against carcinogens?

When people smoke weed, they're usually thinking about two main compounds: THC and CBD. Both have interesting effects: THC gets you high, while CBD isn't intoxicating (it doesn't activate CB1 receptors the way THC does). But these molecules, along with other cannabinoids, might offer some degree of protection against the harmful effects of smoking.

A paper by Robert Melamede, a researcher and cannabis advocate, titled "Cannabis and tobacco smoke are not equally carcinogenic," lays out these mechanisms. Melamede explains that smoke from both sources shares many harmful substances, including procarcinogens called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The body's enzymes turn these compounds into actual carcinogens, but THC appears to block that process, which led Melamede to suggest the cannabinoid has a protective effect.

What research says about weed smoke and cancer

Another paper, published in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, looked at the association between smoking weed and cancer. Before digging in, the team laid out three hypotheses:

• Higher cancer risk: They flagged the possibility that the carcinogenic effects of smoking weed would increase cancer risk.
• Offsetting the harm: They predicted that cannabinoids and other plant compounds might cancel out those harmful effects.
• Lower cancer risk: They hypothesized that cannabinoids' effects might actually lower cancer risk.

After analyzing a large body of data, the authors concluded that the available data don't support the hypothesis that cannabis use increases cancer risk, and that if anything, the data show a trend toward a negative association between cannabis use and cancer risk. That's an interesting signal, not a green light: it doesn't make inhaling smoke good for you.