DON'T BE INHALING THAT VEGETABLE MATTER

Forget that talk about smoking cannabis being better for you than
cigarettes - it's just as bad for the lungs as tobacco, says Robin Taylor,
a researcher at the school of medicine at New Zealand's Otago University.

He says an eight-year study of 900 people aged between 18 and 26 to see how
much breath they could expel from their lungs showed both cannabis and
tobacco narrowed the airways.

Associate professor Taylor told the Otago Daily Times it was not yet known
whether smoking cannabis caused lung cancer, but added, "You can't say
cannabis is safe any more than you can say tobacco is safe.

"The health message is clear - don't be burning vegetable matter and
inhaling it." His study group was examined three times in the eight years
and tests showed that people who smoked cannabis or tobacco expelled less
air in a second than non-smokers and took longer to expel all the air from
their lungs because their airways had narrowed slightly.

Taylor said while all study group members were healthy and differences in
their air flows was "subtle", the figures highlighted a trend.

The study was launched because cannabis use had increased significantly in
most developed countries in the past three decades and people were
increasingly questioning its effects on health.

The people involved will be studied again when they reach the ages of 32 to
37, to obtain more definitive information. Taylor said other studies had
shown the efficiency of tobacco smokers' lungs dropped progressively over
the years at a rate of two or three times more than non-smokers'.

He said the study indicated people's lungs were affected no matter how
little cannabis or tobacco they smoked and when smoking increased, so did
the effects. The study is based at Otago University in Dunedin, but
includes researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and McMaster
University in Canada. Their findings have recently been published in the
London-based medical journal, Addiction. - Sapa-DPA