Good timing! Right after my last post, I hear about this story in the Washington Post (registration required). Apparently a massive study involving over 2,000 people was just released which found no link between marijuana use lung cancer. Even among heavy users there was no increased risk, when heavy use was defined as smoking over 22,000 times over the course of a lifetime. 22,000 times!?!?! Holy shit, that’s a lot of reefer!

The new findings “were against our expectations,” said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

“We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use,” he said. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”

I’ll be damned. Nice to see that they expected the opposite result, as well. Of course, they did find that smoking cigarettes could increase cancer risk up to 20 times.

Given the nature of my opposition to the Drug War, I don’t think that results like this should influence whether or not the drugs are legal. Drugs are dangerous primarily because of their addictive nature and because they can reduce quality of life, so our drug policy should address that issue first and foremost. But it’s damn interesting and yet another reason why it’s crazy that cigarettes and alcohol are legal while marijuana is not.