Marijuana Use Linked to Testicular Cancer

It appears that the antidote for the cancer-causing effect of pot smoking is cocaine use.

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recent study has shown that smoking marijuana can increase men's chances or contracting two particularly deadly forms of testicular cancer. This news comes in a recent issue of the journal Cancer. The research found that pot-smokers were more than twice as likely to have nonseminoma testicular cancer or mixed germ cell tumors, both of which carry with them a very grim prognosis.

The researchers are uncertain about the reason why marijuana use would increase the risk of testicular cancer, but they suspect that the drug may affect the endocannabinoid system, the cellular network that is tied to sperm production.

To avoid testicular cancer, you can do both of these, or better yet, neither.

But the news isn’t all bad for drug users, because it appears that the antidote for the cancer-causing effect of pot smoking is cocaine use. According to the same study, cocaine can reduce the risk of the same testicular cancers that pot smoking can increase. Of course, researchers don’t recommend that pot smokers take up doing coke to reduce their cancer risk.

Not everyone agrees with the conclusion of the pot-smoking study. Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California-San Francisco told HealthDay that if there was a link between marijuana use and testicular cancer, there should have been a spike in the number of cancer cases in California in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that no such spike exists, Abrams suggests, seriously undermines the Cancer study’s results.

Regardless of the testicular cancer/marijuana link, another study suggests that smoking pop might actually have benefits for users’ lungs. A study published earlier this year in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that healthy men who smoked the equivalent of one joint per day for seven years had lung capacity that was 1.6 percent higher than non-pot smokers.