Thanks for the correction, fellas. The one incident I saw, involved manufactured dope, which they called 'chronic'.
I'm very much on the periphery of these things, but very keen to get the 'War on Drugs' ended.
This program has caused so much harm, and is being pursued on idealogical grounds. Right up there with ISIS for anti-social outcomes.
As for the toxicity of weed, the 'study' referred to by Gipper, is panned in the Wikipedia page for the British Lung Foundation, from whom the claim came.
Controversy
In June 2012 the British Lung Foundation released a report looking at the health impacts of smoking cannabis. In one section, the report claimed
"each cannabis cigarette increases the chances of developing lung cancer by as much as an entire packet of 20 tobacco cigarettes".
[1][2][3] The report referenced a 2008 study, "Cannabis use and risk of lung cancer: a case-control study" (Aldington et al.), published in the European Respiratory Journal, to support the claim,
[4] which was repeated by the charity's then chief executive,
Dame Helena Shovelton, in media interviews. This study was refuted 7 months later in the European Respiratory Journal, long before the BLF's claim.
[5] In a BBC radio interview,
[6] Kevin Williamson, author of "Drugs and the Party line", said that there was "no scientific basis to the claim", citing an earlier study of 2200 people published in Cancer Epidemiological Biomarkers and Prevention that had found "that the association of these cancers with marijuana, even long-term or heavy use, is not strong and may be below practically detectable limits". It is unknown why these findings were omitted in the BLF's claim of "one joint is as bad as 20 cigarettes".
[7] Williamson then asked the charity's representative, to cite the research that supported the charity's claim. When he declined to do so, Williamson accused the charity of "putting out bogus information" for "headline grabbing". Online journalist Keelan Balderson
[8] accused the charity of peddling "a long debunked myth" (claiming that it was not the first such incident, citing an earlier BLF claim that "3 joints are equal to 20 cigarettes", taken from a report published in 2002, before the publication of the European Respiratory Journal study.). Peter Reynolds, leader of the political party Cannabis Law Reform (Clear), described the report as a "dangerously irresponsible mix of conjecture, extremist opinion and scaremongering". The British Lung Foundation’s responded by asserting that the report was based on sound research, and that "the report references over 80 peer-reviewed research papers, is the most comprehensive report of its kind yet compiled, and has itself been peer-reviewed by independent experts".
