XPost: alt.politics.marijuana, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics
XPost: or.politics, alt.society.liberalism
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/health/marijuana-heart-death-wellness
Using marijuana doubles the risk of dying from heart disease, according to
a new analysis of pooled medical data involving 200 million people mostly between the ages of 19 and 59.
“What was particularly striking was that the concerned patients
hospitalized for these disorders were young (and thus, not likely to have
their clinical features due to tobacco smoking) and with no history of cardiovascular disorder or cardiovascular risk factors,” said senior
author Émilie Jouanjus, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Toulouse, France, in an email.
Compared to nonusers, those who used cannabis also had a 29% higher risk
for heart attacks and a 20% higher risk for stroke, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Heart.
“This is one of the largest studies to date on the connection between
marijuana and heart disease, and it raises serious questions about the assumption that cannabis imposes little cardiovascular risk,” said
pediatrician Dr. Lynn Silver, a clinical professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco.
“Getting this right is critically important because cardiovascular disease
is the top cause of death both in the United States and globally,” said
Silver, who is also senior adviser at the Public Health Institute, a
nonprofit public health organization that analyzes marijuana policy and legalization.
Silver is the coauthor of an editorial published with the paper that calls
for change in how cannabis is viewed by health professionals, regulatory
bodies and the public at large.
“Clinicians need to screen people for cannabis use and educate them about
its harms, the same way we do for tobacco, because in some population
groups it’s being used more widely than tobacco,” she said. “Our
regulatory system, which has been almost entirely focused on creating
legal infrastructure and licensing legal, for-profit (cannabis)
businesses, needs to focus much more strongly on health warnings that
educate people about the real risks.”
The dangers of smoke (and maybe edibles)
The new systematic review and meta-analysis analyzed medical information
from large, observational studies conducted in Australia, Egypt, Canada, France, Sweden and the US between 2016 and 2023.
Those studies did not ask people how they used cannabis — such as via
smoking, vaping, dabbing, edibles, tinctures or topicals. (Dabbing
involves vaporizing concentrated cannabis and inhaling the vapor.)
However, “based on epidemiological data, it is likely that cannabis was
smoked in the vast majority of cases,” Jouanjus said.
Smoking tobacco is a well-known cause of heart disease — both the smoke
and the chemicals in tobacco damage blood vessels and increase clotting, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Therefore, it is not surprising that smoking, vaping or dabbing cannabis
could do the same, Silver said: “Any of the many ways of inhaling cannabis
are going to have risks to the user, and there’s also secondhand smoke
risks, which are similar to tobacco.”
The notion that smoking cannabis is less harmful because it’s “natural” is
just wrong, Dr. Beth Cohen, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN in a prior interview.
“When you burn something, whether it is tobacco or cannabis, it creates
toxic compounds, carcinogens, and particulate matter that are harmful to health,” Cohen said in an email.
However, edibles may also play a role in heart disease, according to a May
2025 study.
People who consumed edibles laced with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC,
showed signs of early cardiovascular disease similar to tobacco smokers.
“We found that vascular function was reduced by 42% in marijuana smokers
and by 56% in THC-edible users compared to nonusers,” Dr. Leila Mohammadi,
an assistant researcher in cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN in a prior interview.
The danger of high potency weed
None of the studies included in the new meta-analysis asked users about
the potency of THC in the products they consume. Even if they had, that information would be quickly outdated, Silver said.
“The cannabis market is a moving target. It is getting more potent every
day,” she said.
“What’s being sold to people today in California is 5 to 10 times stronger
than what it was in the 1970s. Concentrates can be 99% pure THC. Vapes are
over 80% THC.
“A variety of chemically extracted cannabinoids can be almost pure THC,
and all of these just have very different effects on people than smoking a joint in the 1970s.”
Higher potency weed is contributing to a host of problems, including an increase in addiction — a July 2022 study found consuming high-potency
weed was linked to a fourfold increased risk of dependence.
In the United States, about 3 in 10 people who use marijuana have cannabis
use disorder, the medical term for marijuana addiction, according to the
CDC.
“We know that more potent cannabis makes people more likely to become addicted,” Silver said. “We know that more potent cannabis makes people
more likely to develop psychosis, seeing and hearing things that aren’t
there, or schizophrenia. Habitual users may also suffer from
uncontrollable vomiting.”
The rise in potency is one reason that the current study may not have
captured the full extent of the risk of marijuana for heart disease,
Jouanjus said: “We are afraid that the association might be even stronger
than that reported.”
While science continues to study the risk, experts say it’s time to think
twice about the potential harms of cannabis use — especially if heart
disease is a concern.
“If I was a 60-year-old person who had some heart disease risk, I would be
very cautious about using cannabis,” Silver said. “I’ve seen older people
who are using cannabis for pain or for sleep, some of whom have
significant cardiovascular risk, or who have had strokes or had heart
attacks or had angina, and they have no awareness that this may be putting
them at greater risk.”
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November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.
Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
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