“Find a new vice,” my doctor told me. Smoking one joint a day, he said, increases your risk of lung cancer by 8 percent each year. He is the top lung surgeon in town. I quit smoking cigarettes 30 years ago, but I’m still at risk because of the years I smoked. Stupidity follows you. And then there’s my vice.
“Vaping, too?” I asked, meaning using a vaporizer to inhale the marijuana vapors.
“Vaping, too,” he told me.
Big Cannabis is spending big on research about the medicinal benefits of marijuana. I’m all for it. My own experience is that marijuana is powerful medicine for both pain and depression.
But are they also funding research into the dangers of all of us, ex-smokers included, smoking and vaping the beautifully packaged products that are now legally available in some 21 states and have turned smoking pot into a huge growth industry?
Five years ago, when UCLA started a cannabis research institute, the Los Angeles Times asked whether industry would be supporting the program and was told that the answer was no. Not so fast. Documents obtained by the newspaper and others released under the state open records law showed that cannabis companies and major investors in them provided financial support for the program.
