Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the United States.
These observations justify concern about the potential adverse pulmonary effects resulting from the long-term smoking of only a few marijuana cigarettes a day.
Doctors concluded that daily marijuana smoking was associated with an elevated risk of health care use for various health problems. Frequent smokers had a small but significant increased risk of outpatient visits for respiratory illness, and other types of illnesses compared with nonsmokers. Marijuana smoking produces histopathological changes that precede lung cancer, and long-term marijuana smoking may increase the risk of respiratory cancer.
Researchers concluded that long term cannabis use was associated with disruption of short-term memory, working memory, and attention skills in older long-term marijuana users.
For pregnant marijuana smokers, there is also concern about the possibility of genotoxic effects on the fetus, resulting in heightened risk of birth defects or childhood cancer.
The researchers also suggested that marijuana use might interact with mutagenicity and other risk factors to increase the risk of head and neck cancer.
There was examined the health effects of smoking marijuana by comparing the medical experience of daily marijuana smokers who never smoked tobacco with a demographically similar group of nonsmokers of either substance.
Smoking only a few marijuana cigarettes a day (without tobacco) has the same effect on the prevalence and chronic respiratory symptoms and the extent of tracheobronchial epithelial histopathology as smoking more than 20 tobacco cigarettes a day (without marijuana).
Most patients described serious problems from marijuana: more than 80% of male and 60% of female patients met criteria for marijuana dependence, 66% of marijuana-dependent patients reported withdrawal, and more than 25% had used marijuana to relieve withdrawal symptoms (e.g., irritability, restlessness, insomnia, anorexia, nausea, sweating, salivation, elevated body temperature,
tremor, and weight loss) that were clinically significant.
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