The Australian: January 12, 2012

According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, those who smoke cannabis occasionally do not experience “long-term lung damage the way cigarette smokers do and may actually experience a slight improvement.” The research team recruited people between the ages of 18-30 in the United States and tracked them from 1985 to 2006. They found that “for those who reported smoking an average of one joint a day for seven years...the study found no harmful lung effects resulted” in terms of how much air and how hard people could exhale. Compared to cigarette smokers, whose “lung function got worse over time”, cannabis smokers’ lung function improved “slightly”. This improvement was however “so small that most people would likely not notice at all”, study author Stefan Kertesz said. He also emphasised that their findings do not mean that “heavy” cannabis use is safe, as there was evidence of “harm in pulmonary function” in their study.