Raven: My name is Raven, I am from Virginia and I want to know what are the long-term effects that smoking marijuana has on the person's asthma?
Charlie Strange: Let's start first with disease asthma. Asthma is an airways disease, the lungs have many airways that move from the trachea, the wind pipe down out to the edges of the lung. In asthma, these airways are twitchy, that means that the they spasm in response to a variety of stimuli, strong smells, but most important our smoke inhalation and so we see asthma exaggeration in fire fighters and cigarette smokers and marijuana is no exceptions.
So Raven when you ask about the effects of marijuana, the second thing other than having airways spasm, cough and shortness of breath around the time of smoking itself, marijuana like other smokes, brings inflammatory cells. Cells from the blood into the airways that makes these airways have perpetual twitchyness. They will be twitchy for as long as six weeks after smoking a single marijuana cigarette.
We really don't know very much about the long-term effects with marijuana on the lungs, but we do think it can be a cause of more chronic diseases such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema as well.
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