Smoking pot as bad for you as smoking cigarettes

Several dozen medical marijuana patients and caregivers gathered on a recent week night for a two-hour seminar at Forgotten Knowledge Collective in Valley Springs.

After giving them an overview of the biology and science behind medical pot, biochemist Samantha Miller turned to one of the biggest questions facing the medical marijuana movement: to smoke or not to smoke.

Miller urges medical marijuana patients to cast off their butane lighters.

"When you are smoking, you are losing some of your active ingredient to combustion," Miller said.

And then there's the lung irritation that comes from inhaling butane and the jagged soot from burning plant matter at about 1,200 degrees.

Alternatives to smoking include edible forms of the drug, skin patches and tinctures that use alcohol or glycerine solutions to deliver the active compounds. One of the most popular, however, is the use of devices that vaporize the active ingredients in marijuana without burning it.

"Smoking it is not good for you, OK?" said Dr. Stacey Kerr, a Santa Rosa physician and a member of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians.

She advises patients to seek other methods. "The least they need to do is to use a vaporizer if they are going to inhale."

Vaporizers are not cheap. The devices can cost $200 or more and can be tricky for first-time users to operate. Also, medical marijuana users accustomed to smoking often initially report that vaporizing does not seem to yield the same benefits.

Miller acknowledged that. "The effects you are going to feel, the high, is going to be different than when you smoke," she said.

The active compounds in marijuana vaporize at relatively low temperatures.

A study by Dr. Donald Abrams at the University of California, San Francisco, concluded that vaporizing is a "safe mode of delivery" and that participants in the study came to prefer it.