Doctors have warned that young people in their 30s who smoke cannabis for almost ten years have lungs so badly damaged they look like an 80-year-old’s.
They say that young adults, after having smoked cannabis for less than a decade, developed severe, rapid and advanced form of the lung disease, emphysema.
Dr Damian Mckeon, a consultant in respiratory medicine at Ysbyty Gwynedd (Wales), who studied eight patients that had smoked at least five joints a day, said: “We are seeing young people on the wards with the lungs of 80-year-olds after less than a decade of smoking cannabis and tobacco”.