Filed Under: Smoke & Die
They say weed might kill you. Again.
This time, it is a peer-reviewed study out of Massachusetts General Hospital, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. It claims that people who use cannabis daily are more likely to develop heart failure. The study is getting headlines from Forbes to Yahoo News. Politicians and pearl-clutchers are citing it already. Another notch in the long tradition of anti-weed pseudoscience dressed up in academic robes.
But when you drill into the study itself, when you read past the fear-mongering headlines, the press releases, and the tidy media packages, it starts to fall apart. Not because weed is perfect, but because the research, again, is built on flimsy methodology and a suspicious lack of context.
The study analyzed data from 156,999 patients over nearly four years, focusing on self-reported daily cannabis use. The conclusion is that people who reported using cannabis every day were 34 percent more likely to develop heart failure than non-users. That sounds serious, but it hinges on how they got there.
Let’s start with the basics. Cannabis use was self-reported. That means no toxicology confirmation, no measurement of THC levels, no distinction between smoking flower, eating edibles, or vaping mystery oil from gas station carts. No data on potency. No data on duration of use or lifestyle context. Just a checkbox, “Do you use cannabis daily?” compared against thousands of medical records.
The second red flag is that the study makes no serious attempt to factor in preexisting conditions, genetics, environmental triggers, or socioeconomic variables. There is no adjustment for the massive variety of cannabis types or ingestion methods. No real analysis of dosage. No accounting for people who may be using cannabis to manage chronic illness, an illness that may already increase their cardiac risk. Instead, it draws a clean, unearned line between cannabis use and heart disease.
It gets worse.
The database used, Mass General’s All of Us Research Program, is not a cannabis study cohort. It is a broad, NIH-funded data bank intended for general health tracking. It is not built to isolate cannabis effects in a scientifically meaningful way. The study relies overwhelmingly on hospital records. These are not autopsies. They are not physiological measurements from a controlled lab. They are notes made by busy clinicians, often inputted under pressure, using shorthand and incomplete data. One mislabeled diagnosis or missed variable, and the entire analysis can veer off course.
Dr. Robert Kloner, chief science officer at Huntington Medical Research Institutes and a longtime cardiovascular researcher, told Medscape,
“Associations like this are interesting, but they’re not proof of causality. There’s a huge difference between correlation and causation, especially with self-reported substance use.”
He also flagged what most cannabis users already know. People lie on surveys. Especially about weed. Especially when they think it might be used against them.
So what is this really about?
Control. Blame. Corporate messaging. Fear.
This is not the first time the medical establishment has floated a cannabis-heart scare. In 2014, French researchers blamed weed for 2 percent of cardiac deaths in young people, only to quietly walk it back months later. In 2022, the Journal of the American Heart Association ran a similar piece warning about arrhythmia, again with vague correlations and no chemical verification. The headlines explode. The nuance evaporates.
And who benefits?
Lawmakers are trying to stall legalization. Police departments are justifying drug enforcement budgets. Pharmaceutical lobbies are protecting their stake in pain and sleep medications. Employers are hoping to preserve drug-testing policies that disproportionately impact poor and minority workers. Rehab centers. Insurance companies. Your boss. Your parole officer. The three billion dollar drug-testing industry. The whole post-DARE industrial complex profits off public confusion.
Cannabis remains one of the only substances in America regularly demonized despite decades of evidence showing relatively low risk. No studies are proving that moderate cannabis use causes heart attacks in healthy people. But that does not stop media outlets from equating weed with cyanide every time a shaky study hits PubMed.
Here is the real story. We need better science. Real, funded, controlled clinical research with human volunteers, verified product, and long-term tracking. Instead, we are getting half-baked meta-analyses of anonymized hospital charts, then watching the headlines melt across the country like gospel.
If you are worried about your heart, talk to your doctor. But do not confuse science with scare tactics. Especially when those tactics serve the same old machine.
Because the real risk is not that weed will kill you.
It is that lies about weed that still can.
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