Although teachers and parents always cautioned their kids to the harms of drinking, medical science has held up that moderate drinking may actually have some health benefits (one 12 oz. glass of red wine, or one pint of beer a day). The same will never be said for cigarettes, whose harmful effects are widely researched and publicly acknowledged. However, new research shows that marijuana cigarettes (joints) may actually improve certain health factors in moderation, over the same frequency of use with cigarettes.

Researchers with the National Institute of Health recently completed a 20-year descriptive study that attempted to measure the effects of marijuana use over tobacco use on pulmonary and respiratory health. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, show that the moderate use of medical grade marijuana is significantly better for an individual than an equally moderate use of tobacco. The research, with studied the effects of smoking in over 5,000 adults aged 18 to 30, found significant deterioration of air flow within individual tobacco smokers; and the more they smoked, the worse their air flow performed.

However, the study found that individuals that smoked a single joint a day performed perfectly on a lung-function test (i.e. equal to that of a healthy non-smoker) and in some cases even improved over the standard.

Mark Pletcher of the University of California at San Francisco was the lead author in the study. “We found exactly what we thought we would find in relation to tobacco exposure: a consistent loss of lung function with increasing exposure,” he stated in the official release, “We were, however, surprised that we found such a different pattern of association with marijuana exposure.”

Pletcher and his colleagues warn, however, that this is not condoning the heavy use of marijuana. Although the research seems to indicate that moderate use of marijuana (a joint a day or less) shows no adverse health effects, heavy use of the drug shows significant impacts to pulmonary function. With increase in use comes an increase in the decline of pulmonary function over one joint a day.

Science continues to lend credence to the saying, “everything in moderation”. A glass of wine, a cup of coffee, a pint of beer, and now a joint a day seem to go just as far as a single apple in “keeping the doctor away”. Of course, I don’t see teachers and parents advocating for local dispensaries as part of one’s daily nutritional regimen.