Whenever I critique a study that purports to show some danger related to marijuana, I always make it clear that the arguments against marijuana prohibition are not based on the assumption that marijuana is harmless. Nothing is harmless for everyone under all circumstances, and harmlessness cannot be a criterion for anything to be legal.
Nonetheless, here we go again.
This U.S. News & World Report headline was typical: “Vaping Pot Worse Than Vaping Tobacco for Teens’ Lungs: Study.”
The first problem is simply that the teens were not vaping “pot.” They were vaping some unknown liquids that supposedly contained THC and perhaps other cannabinoids.
Second, the sample for the study was based on national data, which would normally be a good thing, but in much of the country, marijuana was, and still is, illegal, so the vaping devices and their content may well have been contraband.
Third, the data was based on sampling from “between December 2016 and January 2018 – prior to the wave of lung injuries among young people that occurred in 2019. It was given the name EVALI, or e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury.”
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