If you smoke, vape or otherwise inhale your cannabis, you should be thinking about your lung health. Whether you’re a regular user, enjoy an occasional puff, or take record-setting dab hits, what you breathe in has an effect on your lungs. So you should know what weed’s effect on the lungs really is.
However, understanding the effect weed has on your lung health is only part of the picture. (And maybe, for you, not even the most interesting part.) Knowing weed’s effect on the lungs is also essential for understanding the ideas that drive innovation in the cannabis industry.
New products, new technology, new practices—they’re all about refining and improving your experience with cannabis, whether you use it for health, wellness, pleasure or all of the above.
We take a look at accessible information about weed’s effect on the lungs, drawn from the best research. Beyond the basics of how cannabis interacts with your lungs, we also examine how those interactions change depending on what cannabis product you’re using—and how those differences are driving innovation.
So take a deep breath—and away we go!
What Is A Lung, Anyway?
Okay, we’ll start with the most important element. You can’t know weed’s effect on the lungs without knowing what a lung is and how it works, right?
The lungs are amazing organs. As you breathe in, muscles pull air down your throat and into an ever-narrowing series of airways, ending up in the alveolar ducts. In these ducts, your lungs exchange life-giving oxygen for toxic carbon dioxide.
Hundreds of millions of microscopic alveoli push oxygen into your bloodstream and pull out CO2, which you then exhale. It’s this blood/air exchange that makes it possible for inhaled weed to get into your system.