Smoking Resin: A Health Risk?

Hey there,
Frequent reader of the blog. I just had a quick question for you, as
I'm having a hard time finding a straight answer on this. Is smoking
the resin (scraped from your pipe or bong) extremely unhealthy? Is it
worse for your health than smoking buds?

If when you say "resin" you are referring to the black/brown sticky coating that accumulates in the bowl of a pipe or bong, then yes, it is definitely more harmful to smoke than buds. This "resin" (more correctly called pitch or tar) is a mixture of the byproducts of combustion of cannabis. This includes THC and other cannabinoids, but it also includes a whole lot of carbon, as well as some other waste products -- some of which are quite unfriendly to your lungs. In order to smoke resin, most people end up holding the flame of the lighter on the resin for longer than they would a bud, thus causing more of the already ashen material to burn and be inhaled -- and as logic will tell you, breathing in extra-hot particles of ash is not a good idea. Add this to the fact that the additional heat will actually destroy some of the THC, and you can be sure that it's on the upper end of the harm-per-high scale.

So it's more harmful than smoking buds -- but how much more harmful? Unfortunately, there I cannot provide an answer. To my knowledge, nobody has done studies on the THC/contaminant ratio of resin smoke, so I don't think there's any data available for comparison. My guess? It's quite a bit more harmful. Think about it -- in addition to producing hotter smoked (which can increase the chance of lung tissue scaring), you're also starting with material that has a fairly substantial amount of ash in it.

Personally, I don't smoke resin out of concern for my health -- and I'd advise you not to either. If you do, try not to make it a regular practice.

If you liked that post, then try these...

Weed Mixers (or What do I mix with my pot?) on February 28th, 2008

The Strength of Marijuana on April 26th, 2007

The Strength of Dutch Weed on December 5th, 2007

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Health/Medicine, Q/A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Smoking Resin: A Health Risk?”

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d Says:
May 27th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Resin is defined (by Miriam Webster) as: any of various solid or semisolid amorphous fusible flammable natural organic substances that are usually transparent or translucent and yellowish to brown, are formed especially in plant secretions.
Resin is not what's left over in your pipe. In fact, what is really left over should be called pitch (or, although incorrectly, tar), which is created from the burning of organic materials.
So, resin becomes pitch when burned and gets stuck on the bowl. I would advise anybody not to smoke "resin" at all, regardless of the circumstance.

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