Marijuana use holds three-fold blood pressure death risk: study

Totally with you there. I've been oscillating between smoking and vaporizing, and running and not running lately. I feel best, by a gigantic margin, when I am vaping and running >4x / week. I guess that's kind of a no brainer. I think you are correct that this has a lot to do with other factors. I know some lazy stoners, and I've been that lazy stoner.

There are a couple of things about this study that are puzzling to me.

First, I'm a little confused about how to interpret the finding that hypertension related deaths increased, but not stroke or heart attack; I have not been aware of hypertension as a common direct cause of death. For example the textbook "Cardiology Explained" states that: "If untreated, hypertension has serious consequences, including renal disease, myocardial infarction (MI), and cerebrovascular accident." Most general literature that I can recall reading seemed to similarly characterize high blood pressure as a risk factor for other causes of death.

Second, the author of study states "Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health." Who is supporting "liberal marijuana use"? Support for "liberal use" is not implied by support for decriminalization.

I hope that press release has left out some sort of context or attribution for this, because it is making it hard for me to take the study seriously.

Here is the meat of the abstract, and a link to the full text of the study: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2047487317723212

"Method: We linked participants aged 20 years and above, who responded to questions on marijuana use during the 2005 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to data from the 2011 public-use linked mortality file of the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only participants eligible for mor- tality follow-up were included. We conducted Cox proportional hazards regression analyses to estimate hazard ratios for hypertension, heart disease, and cerebrovascular mortality due to marijuana use. We controlled for cigarette smoking and other relevant variables.

Results: Of the 1213 eligible participants 72.5% were presumed to be alive. The total follow-up time was 19,569 person-years. Adjusted hazard ratios for death from hypertension among marijuana users compared to non-marijuana users was 3.42 (95% confidence interval: 1.20–9.79) and for each year of marijuana use was 1.04 (95% confidence interval:1.00–1.07).

Conclusion: From our results, marijuana use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality. Increased duration of marijuana use is associated with increased risk of death from hypertension. Recreational marijuana use potentially has cardiovascular adverse effects which needs further investigation."

I am curious of the socioeconomic status of these users who are spending $60 a day? I thought my $60 a week usage was a heavy expense.

Not quite. I'm a lobbyist in the health care industry, and policy related to alcohol and tobacco are designed to meet a very different policy goal from over the counter medications. The latter is a can of worms beyond the scope of this but let's narrow to alcohol and tobacco.

First, alcohol is not as highly regulated as you might think. The contents of the bottle are not strongly regulated, and producers are actually forbidden under the law from listing the ingredients on the bottle.[3] How do you know you're drinking true vodka, and not a mixture of grain alcohol or something worse? Without testing there is no way to find out, and the government doesn't do that unless there is a strong reason to do so. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulates the label, they regulate those labels a LOT, but along with advertising that's about it.[4] The rest of alcohol regulation is devoted to keeping it away from those under 21, with some PSA's on pregnancy, alcoholism, etc.

Tobacco is almost as highly regulated. Science has proven, more than we can count, and completely indisputable, that tobacco use leads to serious, life threatening health concerns.[5] The best policy position to take on tobacco is to ban it, but they don't.[6] The next best thing would be to set standards that limit the chemicals in tobacco.[0][8] They don't. (Incidentally tobacco products weren’t even regulated by the FDA until 2009)[8] This leaves regulation on packaging, advertising [7], where you can smoke, but has become largely focused on keeping it away from children, and reducing smoking. So in a way the government might seem to be protecting us from tobacco, but in reality, they don't.

Marijuana on the other hand is so highly regulated[1] that it's been extremely difficult to even study it[2] to determine what health affects it might have. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but morality has driven policy on marijuana for so long that the policy research on marijuana legalization, is only now beginning to gain substance. Until marijuana is studied as much as tobacco and alcohol, all policy decisions will be unfairly biased by morality and personal opinion.

[0]. http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/smoking-facts/whats-in-a-ci... [1]. https://www.fda.gov/downloads/aboutfda/centersoffices/office... [2]. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/us/politics/medical-marij... [3]. http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/11/nutrition-labeling-of-wi... [4]. https://www.ttb.gov/consumer/labeling_advertising.shtml [5]. https://betobaccofree.hhs.gov/health-effects/smoking-health/... [6]. http://www.denverpost.com/2008/08/13/why-congress-wont-ban-t... [7]. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fdas-graphic-cigarette-labels-ru... [8]. http://gizmodo.com/the-fda-is-cracking-down-on-american-spir...

Mostly missed in the comments is that marijuana is safer than marriage.