I can certainly tell you that there's no reason to believe that smoking cannabis is somehow better than smoking cigarettes, but the dose seems to be significantly lower. In other words, you know, let's consider a person who smokes a pack a day for 20 years. We call that a 20 pack year smoker.

Someone who smokes two packs a day for 15 years is a 30 pack year smoker. That's a person who's dramatically increased their risk of many cancers, including lung cancer and also their risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Again, I'm not a, I'm not a THC guy, so I don't, I can't necessarily speak for the habits of people that are smoking marijuana.

I can't imagine they're smoking that much. Probably not. Yeah. But while on a, on a joint to cigarette basis, they're probably equivalent in terms of harm. I don't know. Let's say a person smokes a joint a day. That would be like smoking a cigarette a day. You know, that's a 20th of a pack.

Again, I don't want to say that there's no downside to that, but it's, it's probably significantly less. So I don't, I don't think the risk fully tracks. I think the same is probably true for vaping. And I want to be clear, like, I don't think vaping is a good idea.

My, my, you know, I, the last time I looked at the data on this, it was surprisingly sparse. But to me, the only advantage I could see to vaping was if it was the only way a person would stop smoking. So there was, you know, I sort of looked at it as, it was the, definitely the lesser of two evils, but the, by far the better scenario was not to do any of these things.

If nicotine is what you're after, there are better ways to get nicotine, for example, through lozenges and gum and things like that. So that you shouldn't be turning to those things to do it. But, but if it was like, if gum is here and cigarettes are here, you know, vaping was probably here.

But boy, I don't know. For those listening, Peter spaced his hands far apart for gum and smoking and put vaping about a third of the way from gum toward smoking. In other words, vaping isn't good for you, but it's not as bad as smoking. That would be my, that would be my, I mean, do you have a, you've probably looked into this as well.

What were your reviews on this? Yeah, we did an episode on nicotine. I did an episode on cannabis and you know, that the discussion around cannabis gets a little contentious for reasons that aren't important. It's kind of funny, people, the moment someone starts to confront cannabis as a potential health harm, people say it's not as nearly as bad as alcohol, which is a crazy argument, right?

Getting hit by a bus isn't nearly as bad as getting hit by a motorcycle in most cases, but sometimes, you know, so that's just kind of silly. And clearly cannabis has medical applications. Yeah. Clearly. And then it becomes an issue of the ratio of THC to CBD, pure CBD forms actually being quite effective for the treatment of certain forms of epilepsy, so-called Charlotte's Web.

That's actually what it's called. Very high THC containing cannabis clearly predisposes, especially young males to later onset psychosis. Those data are starting to become clear, clear enough to me anyway that people ought to be aware of them at least and maybe make decisions on the basis of those. When it comes to the smoking versus vaping, it's just very, very apparent that the chemical constituents of the vape and what people are inhaling are terrible for people and are loaded with carcinogens and a bunch of other stuff, many of which cross the blood brain barrier.

So that's what worries me the most, you know, obviously I'm not a clinician, but anytime I hear about small molecules, you know, these small inorganic molecules getting across the blood brain barrier and then being maintained in neurons for many, many years, I worry because the experiment is ongoing mostly in young people.

So anyway, without going too far down that track, I think if people can avoid smoking and vaping, they should. And as you mentioned, there are other delivery devices for nicotine and cannabis, tinctures and patches and gums and things that, um, edibles that, um, if people choose to use those substances.

Yeah. I think sometimes people would benefit to, to imagine what the surface area of the lung is, right? If you took the alveolar air sacs of the lungs and spread them out, you would easily cover a tennis court. Remarkable. So just think about anytime you inhale something, you are exposing, your body is so adept at absorbing it.

I mean, we have this unbelievable system for gas exchange that was designed for gas exchange. And anytime you're putting something else in that wake, you're doing a really good job of getting it into your body. So be mindful of what that is. Um, and, and that, look, that applies to, to pollution too.

I mean, the, the PM 2.5 data is pretty good. I think once you, so particulates that are less than 2.5 microns are, are getting straight into the body, um, which is like a great argument for avoiding air pollution, right? I mean, I, I, I always find it funny not to get off on this tangent, but to me, the most compelling arguments around cleaner energy have nothing to do with greenhouse gases.

They have to do with air pollution. I promise you more people are dying from the particulate matters in air that result from burning coal than are ever going to die from the CO2 emissions that result from that. It's not, it's, and I would argue that's going to be two orders of magnitude.

It's not even in the same zip code. That makes sense. During the fires, which seemed to follow me, uh, because when I was in Northern California, there were a bunch of fires and we were constantly looking, I mean, wake up in the morning, everything was covered with ash. Um, my dog was having trouble breathing.

I was having trouble breathing. Everyone was suffering. Uh, but there are websites that one can go, you can just look at air pollution and we tend to only do this during fires. And then, um, you know, when I'm in Southern California, there tend to be fires here. So, um, you know, it's correlation, not causation, but, um, for sure I didn't set those fires folks.

But it's clear that it disrupts your breathing for a very long period of time. But it's the long tail of that, that we're really talking about here, the very small particulate that we know firefighters for instance, and certain, um, industrial workers can end up with that stuff embedded in their brain tissue for extremely long periods.

It's just not good. Um, you make a really interesting point.