Smoking Weed Raises Risk Of Coronavirus.

If you’re smoking weed to ease your stress during the coronavirus pandemic, experts said , it’s time to think twice. Smoking marijuana, even occasionally, can increase your risk for more severe complications from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. “What happens to your airways when you smoke cannabis is that it causes some degree of inflammation, very similar to bronchitis, very similar to the type of inflammation that cigarette smoking can cause,” said pulmonologist Dr. Albert Rizzo, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association. “Now you have some airway inflammation and you get an infection on top of it. So, yes, your chance of getting more complications is there.”

Hey wait, you might say, I’ve only just started and I’m not smoking much so what’s the harm? The problem, said Dr. Mitchell Glass, a pulmonologist and spokesperson for the American Lung Association, is that the last thing you want during a pandemic is to make it more difficult for a doctor to diagnose the symptoms.  “Covid-19 is a pulmonary disease,” Glass said. “Do you really want to have a confounding variable if you need to see a doctor or a healthcare worker by saying, ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m not a regular user of cannabis, but I decided to use cannabis to calm myself down.’

“You don’t want to do anything that’s going to confound the ability of healthcare workers to make a rapid, accurate assessment of what’s going on with you,” he added. Is that cough from smoking or coronavirus? “Chronic” marijuana smoking, defined as daily use, damages the lungs over a period of time. The end result “looks a lot like chronic bronchitis, which is of course one of the terms we use for chronic obstructive lung disease, or COPD,” Glass said. Smokers, people with COPD and other chronic lung diseases, as well as people with moderate to severe asthma are among those at high risk for severe illness from Covid-19, including the worst-case scenario of being placed on a ventilator in order to continue breathing.

Signs of lung damage from smoking even just a few cigarettes can show up in a matter of days. While a hit or two of marijuana doesn’t compare, there are some unique properties to a joint of weed that are definitely problematic for the lungs even if you’re a new smoker, Glass said. Think of what happens to a cigarette when lit and left in an ashtray it will burn quickly all the way down to the filter, with nothing left but ash. “Marijuana burns at a much, much lower temperature than a commercially made cigarette,” said Glass. “Because of that, the person is inhaling a certain amount of unburnt plant material.”That irritates the lungs in the same manner as ragweed, birch and oak pollen does for those allergic to them, he said.

The need for a clear head

There’s another factor as well. As we all know, weed not only calms you down, but it messes with your ability to function  and that does you no favors if you find yourself having a medical emergency during a pandemic. The national drug survey also found more than a third of young adults aged 18 to 25 said they used marijuana during 2018, along with more than 13% of adults aged 26 or older. “Marijuana use among seniors is not bouncing up and down like with other drugs. It’s a straight line up,” said study co-author Joseph Palamar, an associate professor of population health at New York University’s

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