Marijuana is Bad For Your Lungs — Just Sayin…

Can we talk?

I assure you, I know whereof I speak on the subject. I started using marijuana in 1964, and it’s been a part of my life ever since. That’s over 60 years.

I don’t consider myself a stoner — I’ve never smoked it all day long, or every day, for that matter. I’ve never depended upon it, or been “addicted.” But I loved its effects from the start — and still do. Yet in recent years I’ve realized I had to face the fact that smoking it damages your lungs. Sorry…

First, a bit of history (according to PBS’ Frontline): In the late 1800s, marijuana “…became a popular ingredient in many medicinal products and was sold openly in public pharmacies.”

After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mexican immigrants into the U.S. introduced the recreational use of marijuana. By the time of the Great Depression, massive unemployment and resentment of immigrants led to association of marijuana with violence and crime. By 1931, 29 states had outlawed marijuana.

In 1936, the propaganda film “Reefer Madness” showed high school students’ use of marijuana leading to hit-and-run, murder, rape and other crimes. The film was financed by (of course) church groups.

Marijuana continued to be demonized. In 1958, Neil Cassidy was sentenced for 5 years to life in San Quentin for having one joint. (He was paroled after 2 years.)

Personal Experience/Seeds of Change

In 1964 I was an insurance broker in San Francisco, commuting from Mill Valley. I’d led a “straight” life: Lowell High School, Stanford, the Air Force and now the conventional business world, although I’d always been straining at the leash.

My brother and I were starting to make good money, but I was getting bored. Seeds of what later became the cultural revolution of the ‘60s were starting to sprout and I was getting pulled in other directions.

I started going to early-morning zazen meditation at the nascent San Francisco Zen Center under Suzuki Roshi, and month-by-month got more interested in art, poetry, music, and the bohemian lifestyle. Sometimes on my lunch hour I’d wander around on upper Grant Avenue, looking in at the Coexistence Bagel Shop, then known for poetry readings. One day I bought a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl at City Lights Bookstore.

Beatniks, who had led the way into questioning the conformity and dullness of the ’50s, were being superseded by the hippies (a welcome change).

One night I bought a lid of marijuana from a tattooed sailor who was living (while on shore) with his girlfriend named Zoe in a little cabin in Mill Valley. In those days, small amounts of weed were sold in these metal Prince Albert tins for $20. (A common prank in those days was to call up a drugstore and ask if they had Prince Albert in a tin. When they answered “Yes,” the prankster would say, “Well, you better let him out!”

Getting On the Right Side of My Brain

After smoking it that night, I saw a vivid green landscape when I closed my eyes in bed. The next morning on the ferryboat into San Francisco, I sat in the morning sunshine on deck, closed my eyes, and saw whirling colors.

None of my friends, from either high school or college were smoking weed. The only exception was my friend Tony Serra, who had graduated from law school, and was working for the DA in Oakland. He had taken LSD, but never smoked marijuana.

One night, in 1965, before we went out to hear music, I took some marijuana over to the apartment in San Francisco where he and his wife Judy lived. I had learned the ice trick: you took an ice cube tray, placed a piece of aluminum foil over it, tucked it in under the edges, then poked a bunch of holes with a pin at one end, and an inhaling whole diagonally at the other end. You put the weed over the holes, held a match to it, and inhaled the cooled smoke at the other end.

Tony kept saying, “I don’t feel anything.” Then we all went out to Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore district to hear jazz saxophone player, Art Pepper.

It Changed My Life

Marijuana played a big role in my quitting the insurance business. On a sunny morning I walked to a deserted lot several blocks from the office, sat on a pile of lumber , and smoked some pot in a corncob pipe.

When I came back into the office, pleasantly stoned, one of the secretaries told me I had a phone call. It was a client from Santa Cruz and as I talked to him, I thought: what am I doing? There are more interesting things to do in this world besides making money. It was the beginning of the end of my business career.

Later that year, I took a month’s leave of absence (it turned out to be a “vision quest”) from my job, and hitchhiked across the country with a copy of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, hung out with friends in New York, went to visit my cousin Mike in Provincetown, and ended up going to Bob Dylan’s second concert playing rock ‘n’ roll with musicians that later formed The Band in Providence, Rhode Island.

Hold it, what’s actually happening here, is that is that I’m beginning to go down the rabbit hole of relating marijuana experiences, and this would end up being way too long for a Substack post, so I’ll cut to the chase.

I got back to San Francisco, looked at the commuters going into the city, quit my job, and went to work as a carpenter.

Early Warning Signals

After maybe 30-40 years, my throat started feeling a little scratchy and I switched over to vaping. I probably used a dozen or more different systems, including The Volcano and the Pax, ending up with a large glass bong that was filled with ice cubes and water, with the pot ignited by a heat gun, not a flame.

That worked for a while, but eventually, my lungs just didn’t feel right, and I quit smoking or vaping, and these days use edibles (sativa) that I buy, or a tincture I make from sativa-dominant plants that I grow.

Time is Not on Your Side

I tell this to young people, but they just don’t seem to pay attention. For one thing, they aren’t feeling the lung effects yet, and probably won’t for decades. And sure, everyone knows that tobacco is a sure-fire destroyer of the lungs, but if you smoke marijuana with a bong, or a glass pipe, just check out the tar stuck on the glass after smoking. If you’re smoking a joint, or hash, or oil or whatever is the latest trendy mechanism, that tar is incrementally coating your lungs.

If I Had It To Do Over

I would use the bong with ice and heat gun, or any methodology that would cut down on the tars, and I would never use a Bic lighter with a pipe (inhaling butane — what was I thinking?).

A Marvelous Plant

One day, Ed Rosenthal, the pot guru, came out to visit and in my greenhouse, he said: “You don’t get addicted to smoking marijuana, you get addicted to growing it.” It’s a wonderful sturdy, resilient plant that’s a joy to grow. In addition to the state of mind that it produces, it’s used for healing, fiber, clothing and multiple other things.

But how important in your life are your lungs?

Just sayin…