The closer you get to alveoli, the more the whole thing seems like a miracle. It is one often overlooked because we do it 20,000 a day, mostly without thinking about it, but it is a miracle nonetheless: The pulling of oxygen-rich air into the trachea, to flow first though bronchial tubes and then the nested branches of bronchioles before filling the 300 million alveoli that fill our lungs, past membrane and capillary and then suddenly into us, into our blood, to pump through our hands, our brains, our hearts, winning a few more minutes of life for us out of air. And then we breathe out, and we breathe in, and the whole process begins again.
In combusting cannabis, we heat THC, CBD and terpenes so the molecules can hitch a ride into your lungs and blood alongside oxygen. The molecules course alongside oxygenated blood until the cannabinoids diverge, locking into receptors distributed throughout your body as part of your endocannabinoid system. When lock clicks into key, you begin to feel high.
There is a cost to combustion, to bringing THC and CBD into your lungs along with oxygen, and the cost comes from the other compounds which also hitch a ride into your lungs when you smoke. Many compounds are created when burning plant matter. Some of them, like benzene, toluene, and hydrogen cyanide, are known carcinogens, and cannabis smoke produces an equivalent amount of these compounds as tobacco smoke.
It may be due to the lack of nicotine, or the fact that cannabis smokers combust less plant matter relative to cigarette smokers, or some other factor that we don’t yet understand, but smoking cannabis seems to be a lower risk activity compared to smoking cigarettes, with little epidemiological evidence so far that smoking cannabis leads to increased rates of cancer.
There is, however, a fairly substantial link between heavy cannabis use and respiratory disease, with cannabis users showing increased risk of chronic bronchitis, inflammation, and pneumonia. Dr. Lester Greenspoon has called this respiratory harm “the only well-confirmed deleterious physical effect of marijuana”.
The frustrating part about all this is that the respiratory harm being done is done by “the crude delivery system” of burning up plant matter to get to the cannabinoids, not the cannabinoids (the stuff you actually want in your system) themselves.
Vapes were created to solve this problem, to provide a more elegant system of delivery, one which keeps the terpenes and THC and CBD but avoids the carcinogens and tar produced by combustion.
Vape pens and cartridges are filled with a liquid formed by extracting cannabinoids from the plant matter, with many companies suspending the extracted cannabinoids in some sort of carrier oil. In theory, this keeps the benefits of combusting cannabis while avoiding the harmful byproducts. In practice, however, things are not so clear cut.
Much of the market for vapes has come from unregulated sources, and heavy metals, pesticides, residual solvents, flavourings, and cheap thickening agents were often included in the liquid along with the cannabinoids. Instead of helping to reduce the risks of smoking cannabis, unregulated vapes simply swapped one set of harmful compounds for another.
This became clear last year after a surge in illnesses, and even a few fatalities, were attributed to the use of vaping products. It was not the inhalation of cannabinoids which caused the illness, but the other compounds which found their way into the liquid that people had inhaled. The FDA has pointed to vitamin E, a cheap thickening agent, as the main cause of the illness, and there has been a reduction in reports of the vaping illnesses since American producers have banned that ingredient from their vapes.
In Canada’s federally licensed market, however, these substances have been banned from the beginning, with much higher standards of quality control and legal repercussions for producers who are non-compliant with these consumer safety laws. Canada’s legal vapes have hit the market this January, and after being sold coast to coast for nearly a year, there has been nothing resembling the outbreak of vaping illness caused by the consumption of unregulated vapes last year.
This does not mean that the risks are zero. The long term safety of inhaling some of the federally approved ingredients, namely vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol, is still unclear. In fact, because this method of consumption is so new, it would be irresponsible to guarantee that there are no long term risks associated with vapes; they haven’t been around long enough for us to say with certainty. However, federally licensed vapes should be considered as being in an entirely different category of risk compared to unregulated variants, and based on everything we now know about the relative harms, regulated vapes look to be a lower risk method of cannabis consumption relative to smoking.
If there remain concerns with the uncertainty surrounding vapes, here are two substitute methods of consumption we at Muse would recommend:
Dry Herb Vaporizers—A dry herb vape, like the Pax, is a miniature oven able to heat flower until the cannabinoids vaporize while preventing the plant matter from combusting. These vaporizers give you the benefits of a vape pen (cannabinoids without combustion) without the unknown risks of the ingredients currently in vapes, even regulated ones.
Cannabis Beverages—With THC and CBD bound in nano-emulsions and able to pass directly through the blood brain barrier, these drinks have an onset time (around 20 minutes) much closer to vapes than to traditional edibles. We didn’t know what to think of them when they first landed on our shelves at the end of summer, but the drinks have won us over at the store, and have replaced the habitual after work beer/joint for a couple of us on staff. It is much easier to replace inhaling with ingesting when you don’t have to wait an hour for the effects to kick in.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing proposition, and everyone will find their own balance, but replacing a portion of smoking with lower risk alternatives can help you keep the benefits which can come from including cannabis in a life while ensuring that you keep that miracle, the one you do 20,000 times a day, mostly without thinking about, so intact that you continue to not need to think all that much about it.