Is Vaping Cannabis Actually Better for Your Lungs Than Smoking It? | Research

The takeaway

Vaping cannabis reduces exposure to toxic smoke particles, but the lung health benefit may be smaller than what e-cigarettes offer over smoked tobacco.

Cannabis users curious about whether vaping is meaningfully better for their lungs than smoking.

Lung benefit of vaping over smoking cannabis may be smaller than the equivalent switch for tobacco

What the researchers found

This commentary examined whether vaporizing cannabis provides meaningful respiratory health advantages over smoking it. The author noted that while vaping does reduce exposure to toxic particulates found in cannabis smoke, the clinical benefit to lung health is likely smaller than the advantage of switching from tobacco cigarettes to e-cigarettes.

The reasoning: smoked tobacco causes substantially more lung damage than smoked cannabis, so the room for improvement by switching to a vaporized form is comparatively greater for tobacco users than for cannabis users.

Why it matters

Many cannabis users choose vaping specifically to protect their lungs. This perspective suggests the respiratory benefit, while real, may be more modest than commonly assumed, particularly when compared to the well-documented benefits of switching from smoked tobacco to e-cigarettes.

The numbers in context

No new quantitative data were presented. The commentary synthesized existing knowledge about comparative harms of smoked cannabis versus smoked tobacco.

How the study worked

This was a published commentary in the journal Addiction by a pulmonary medicine researcher with expertise in cannabis and lung health. It drew on existing evidence about cannabis smoke toxicology and comparative respiratory harms.

What this study cannot tell us

This was a brief commentary, not a systematic review or original study. It did not present new data and relied on the author's interpretation of existing evidence. Long-term comparative data on vaping versus smoking cannabis remain limited.

How to read the evidence

This is an expert commentary, not a systematic review or original study. It provides informed perspective but limited new evidence.

When this study was published

Published in 2015. Long-term vaping data have continued to accumulate since this commentary was written.

The bigger picture

The question of vaping versus smoking cannabis has become increasingly relevant as both cannabis legalization and vaping technology have expanded. This commentary provides an important nuance: reducing harm is not the same as eliminating it, and the baseline level of harm matters when evaluating alternatives.

Questions still open

What are the long-term respiratory outcomes for people who exclusively vape cannabis compared to those who smoke it? Are there specific lung conditions where switching from smoking to vaping cannabis shows a clear clinical benefit?

Common questions

Does this mean vaping cannabis is pointless for lung health?

No. Vaping does reduce exposure to harmful combustion byproducts. The commentary simply notes that the magnitude of lung health improvement may be more modest than many people expect, given that cannabis smoking causes less lung damage than tobacco smoking to begin with.

Is smoking cannabis safer than smoking tobacco?

Research generally suggests that cannabis smoke causes less severe lung disease than tobacco smoke, though cannabis smoke still contains many of the same toxic compounds. Neither is without risk to respiratory health.

Read the original research

How beneficial is vaping cannabis to respiratory health compared to smoking?

Addiction (Abingdon, England), 110(11), 1706-7

View on PubMed ↗Publisher’s paper ↗

Citation

Tashkin, Donald P. (2015). How beneficial is vaping cannabis to respiratory health compared to smoking?. Addiction (Abingdon, England), 110(11), 1706-7. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13075