Pop the jar. Take a slow inhale. Squeeze the bud between your fingers and feel how sticky it is. That’s where every honest conversation about cannabis and lungs has to start: not in a research paper, but in your hand, with the plant you’re about to put in your body.
The political landscape around cannabis research is shifting. Federal barriers that limited serious scientific study for decades are beginning to loosen, opening the door to better research and, hopefully, better answers.
That doesn’t mean every belief will be confirmed. It means we may finally have the tools to ask better questions. After 50 years of handcuffs, stigma, and half-answers, we could be on the edge of learning more about this plant in the next decade than we did in the last half-century.
Julie Was Right About More Than Plants
If you read my first piece for High Times, you already know who Julie is.
She was the cleaning lady who caught me growing my first cannabis plants on the roof of my house. She didn’t scold me. She didn’t shame me. Instead, she started pointing out all the other plants growing wild around us and offered a few grow tips.
That moment changed the way I looked at the natural world. Everything I believe about cannabis traces back to that rooftop.
To me, this plant was never meant to exist in isolation. It’s part of a much bigger system: soil, fungi, plants, people, and, yes, the lungs we use to consume it. The more time I spend growing, the harder it becomes to separate one piece from another.
Cannabis isn’t just a product. It’s an ecosystem.
That’s why a study published in JAMA in 2012 caught my attention. Researchers at UC San Francisco and the University of Alabama at Birmingham tracked 5,115 men and women for twenty years through the NIH-funded CARDIA study, measuring lung function at five points along the way. Tobacco smokers showed the steady decline everyone expected. But moderate cannabis smokers — about one joint a day for up to seven years — actually scored higher on FVC, the test that measures how much air you can blow out after taking the deepest breath possible.
Lead author Dr. Mark Pletcher didn’t claim weed was good for your lungs. He pointed out that the deep inhales and breath-holds you take with a joint look a lot like what competitive swimmers do when they train. Either way, the cannabis lungs were holding up fine. Tobacco lungs weren’t. Julie could have told them that without spending twenty years on it.
The Lungs Tell The Truth
I can rip through a bowl, smoke for hours, switch between RAW wraps and a percolator bong, and never feel the burn that one cigarette puts in your chest. With wraps especially, the smoke is smooth, less harsh, and never leaves me hacking the way tobacco does.
That doesn’t make it harmless. It just means my lungs know the difference.
But “better than cigarettes” and “free of consequences” are two different things, and the science gets honest about that too. In 2022, a research team in New Zealand published a follow-up using the Dunedin cohort, tracking more than 1,000 participants from age 18 to 45.
By 45, cannabis users still showed the higher FVC numbers that echoed earlier research. Their FEV1, the airflow measure, was holding up. But something new showed up: a measurable drop in DLCO, the test for how efficiently oxygen crosses from your lungs into your bloodstream. The lungs were still moving air. They were starting to lose efficiency at using it.
The damage that wasn’t visible at 32 was showing up at 45.
Some research has suggested heavy cannabis smoking can carry a respiratory burden that looks larger per joint than cigarette smoke, partly because of how cannabis is inhaled and held. That does not mean a casual weekend smoker is taking on the same risk as a pack-a-day cigarette smoker. It does mean the “weed is harmless” narrative needs a reality check.
It’s not tobacco. It’s never been tobacco. But it’s also not nothing.
The Cart In Your Pocket
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The harm-reduction story for the last decade has been: stop combusting, switch to a vape. Cleaner inhale, no tar, fewer carcinogens from burning plant matter. Most people I know made that pivot without thinking twice.
I’ve bought carts from dispensaries and gas stations both, and the experience is genuinely hit or miss. Some hit clean. Others taste like you’re smoking chemicals or like there’s some kind of filler in there. I can’t prove what’s in those carts. But I can tell you that flower you grew yourself, that you picked yourself, hits the same way home cooking does. Put love into something and it tastes better. There’s no shortcut for that.
Turns out, the research gives that skepticism some footing.
In 2023, researchers at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo published a study in Thorax comparing CBD aerosols with nicotine aerosols. To be clear, this was not a long-term human study of people using dispensary carts. The research used a mouse model, along with in vitro testing on human cells, to compare biological responses to CBD vapor and nicotine vapor.
Within that model, the CBD aerosol produced more focal lung lesions, more inflammation, higher oxidative stress, and more lipid-laden macrophages than nicotine aerosol. The authors concluded that CBD vaping induced a stronger inflammatory response and more lung-injury-associated changes than nicotine vaping. That is not the same as saying every cannabis vape is more dangerous than every nicotine vape. But it does challenge the idea that cannabis vapor is automatically safer just because nothing is burning.
It gets worse when you look at the hardware. In 2024, Canadian researchers presented findings showing that nano-sized metal particles can be present in cannabis vape liquids before the device is ever heated. The team used scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and laser ablation ICP-MS, and found evidence that some metal particles were already in the liquid at the point of purchase, not only released during heating.
That matters because it shifts the question. The issue is not just what happens when the cart gets hot. It is also what may be leaching from the hardware into the oil while the product sits on a shelf, in storage, or in somebody’s car.
Earlier Canadian research on cannabis vape liquids also found that metal analysis in these products is complicated by poor precision and reproducibility, which is another way of saying the testing itself is difficult and the results are not always clean or simple.
And it’s not just metals. A 2022 study analyzing 279 cannabis-based product samples found a 37% failure rate for residual solvents, including ethanol and isopropanol. That study was conducted on cannabis-based products in the South African market, so it should not be used as a blanket indictment of regulated U.S. dispensary products. But it does show why solvent testing matters, especially in markets where oversight, enforcement, or lab standards may be inconsistent.
The COA on the package is supposed to be a guarantee. In reality, it is closer to a snapshot: useful, sometimes reassuring, but only as strong as the lab, the sample, the rules, and the supply chain behind it.
When I say I’m not sure every vape product is as clean, natural, or organic as the branding suggests, this is what I mean. Not because my taste buds are a lab. Because the research keeps finding reasons to ask harder questions.
What You Smell Is What You Get
If you’re rolling instead of vaping, the question becomes what you’re rolling with.
Tobacco wraps, blunts, Backwoods, and Swishers add nicotine to the equation, and that’s where many studies on cannabis smoke and lung health get messy. The 2022 Ottawa CT-scan study that found emphysema in 75% of cannabis smokers also noted a major limitation: most of the cannabis smokers in the study also smoked tobacco. The researchers found higher rates of emphysema and airway inflammation among cannabis smokers, but the overlap with tobacco use makes it hard to pin those findings on cannabis alone.
Hemp wraps, rice papers, and unbleached options like RAW skip the nicotine entirely, but they aren’t free of trade-offs either. Combustion is combustion. Burning plant material can produce tar, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and other irritants. The difference between flower in a clean paper and a tobacco-wrapped blunt may be the difference between a problem and a worse problem, not between damage and no damage.
Dry-herb vaporizers like the Volcano sit in a different category. Heating cannabis to roughly 180 to 220 degrees Celsius can release cannabinoids and many terpenes without fully burning the plant. The peer-reviewed evidence that this is meaningfully better for long-term lung health is still thinner than the vape industry would like you to believe, but the mechanism is real, and the early signal is worth paying attention to.
That said, the device still matters. A well-made dry-herb vaporizer is not the same thing as a cheap pen with mystery alloys. Bad hardware can drag you right back into the heavy-metal conversation.
For me, the real reason I stick with flower comes down to ritual and respect. Every strain has its own flavor, its own terpene profile, its own personality. It starts with popping open the container, taking a slow smell, giving the bud that little squeeze to feel how sticky it is.
You can’t get any of that from a cart.
Sometimes I’m rolling RAW wraps with a wrap-rolling machine. Sometimes I’m hitting a percolator bong. Sometimes I go old school and pull out the gravity bong. There’s passion in it. With flower, what you smell is what you get. With a cart, you’re trusting an extractor, a hardware manufacturer, and a testing lab — three layers of strangers — to deliver something safe to your lungs.
It All Goes Back To The Soil
Here’s where my cannabis worldview parts ways with most smokers.
The other thing I do that many cannabis growers don’t is run my own mushroom lab. I’ve been working with over 350 mushroom genetics for years, building crosses, isolating traits, and watching mycelium spread across agar dishes on my kitchen counter where dinner plates should be.
And the further I’ve gone down that road, the more obvious it’s become that mushrooms and cannabis aren’t separate hobbies. They’re the same conversation.
What you grow your plant in matters as much as what you grow.
When one of my ShitMaster 1000 grow bags has fully flushed and given everything it’s going to give, the spent block doesn’t go in the trash. I break it up and mix it into the soil I’m about to grow cannabis in. The bags themselves are grain-free — something the rest of the industry hasn’t caught up to yet — which means the spent block is cleaner going into your cannabis soil, with no leftover grain feeding contamination risks.
What’s left is broken-down organic matter, beneficial microbes, and live mycelium that cannabis roots can interact with the same way plants do in living soil.
I’ve documented this. And every now and then, while the cannabis is growing, you get a little surprise: mushrooms popping up right next to the stalk.
The first time it happened, it was WTF LC, a Fullsend Organicks original isolate and a cross between Penis Envy and White Teacher. It came up pure white, totally albino, with gills that looked like artwork. The kind of pattern Mother Nature creates that makes you stop and stare.
The cannabis plant kept growing. The mushroom kept growing. They were thriving in the same soil at the same time, and neither one was fighting the other.
That’s not a hack. That’s nature showing you the system underneath the system. Fungi and plants have been building relationships underground for a very long time. We’re the ones who decided to separate them.
That’s what I mean when I say it’s all intertwined. The lungs you’re trying to protect, the plant you’re smoking, the soil it grew in, the fungi feeding the soil — it’s one system. You can’t separate the conversation about what cannabis does to your body from the conversation about what cannabis is grown in.
And the more we lock it up and pretend it’s some isolated chemical product, the more we miss what it actually is: a plant, grown in soil, connected to everything else Mother Nature put here for a reason.
The Federal Window Just Opened
Schedule I status has handcuffed cannabis researchers for decades.
Want to study what carts actually do to lung tissue over five years? Good luck getting through the federal maze. Want to compare combustion versus vaporization versus dry-herb vaping in a properly controlled trial? Same problem.
Almost everything we know about cannabis and lungs comes from observational studies of self-reporting smokers, with all the confounding variables that come with that.
That may finally be changing, at least in part. On April 23, 2026, the Justice Department and DEA issued a final order moving certain cannabis-related substances, including state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products, from Schedule I to Schedule III. The change does not federally legalize cannabis, and it does not erase the conflict between state adult-use markets and federal law, but it could reduce some barriers around medical cannabis research.
The DEA’s broader cannabis rescheduling hearings are scheduled to begin June 29, 2026, which means the federal picture is still moving.
Either way, the next 10 years of pulmonary research are going to look very different from the last 50. Some of what we learn is going to challenge what cannabis culture has taken for granted. And some of it may validate what flower smokers have known in their bodies for decades.
What Your Lungs Already Know
Strip away the studies for a second and look at what we’ve actually been seeing for the last hundred years.
Cigarette smoking has been conclusively linked to chronic bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, and a public health toll severe enough to turn tobacco into one of the most heavily regulated legal products in the country. Cannabis smoke has real respiratory risks too, especially with heavy or long-term use, but the evidence has not produced the same public health profile as tobacco.
That doesn’t mean weed is good for your lungs. It means the evidence keeps pointing in a more complicated direction than the old scare campaigns allowed.
The 2012 study confirmed what many flower smokers already suspected: cannabis did not track like tobacco in that cohort at low to moderate levels of use. The 2022 follow-up reminded us that “better than cigarettes” is not the same as “free.” And the cart-and-contamination data is telling us something cannabis culture needs to hear: the way we consume this plant has changed faster than the science can keep up, and not all of those changes are improvements.
Mother Nature gave us this plant. She gave us the mushrooms growing next to it in the same soil. She gave us lungs that can tell the difference between flower and something assembled through a supply chain you will never see.
We’ve been smoking this plant for thousands of years. The question worth asking isn’t only whether weed is safer than cigarettes. The evidence has been circling that one for a while. The question is whether the way you’re smoking it now is the way you want to be smoking it in 20 years.
Pop the jar. Smell the flower. Pay attention to what your lungs are telling you. They’ve been honest with you this whole time. We’re the ones who stopped listening.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
