Smoking cannabis with tobacco is second nature to many cannabis users around the world, most especially across Europe and in Australia. It is a very bad habit skinning up your weed with tobacco as the two substances have drastically different effects on your well-being.
We have an entire post comparing the differences in how cannabis and tobacco affect your health that you can read here, however, it is no news to anyone, smoking tobacco is not a small hit to your body.
Smoking anything isn’t really good in the first place as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are among many other compounds that are present during the burning process that are toxic and carcinogenic.
Vaporizing has many benefits over smoking and if you are interested you can find out about them here.
Having said that, even if you don’t convert to vaporizing, but keep smoking, you should never use tobacco with your cannabis.
I remember during my teenage years when I was living in Europe, it was only natural to mix your cannabis with tobacco.
According to the 2017 Global Drug Survey, as much as 94% of Italian Cannabis users mix tobacco with their marijuana. My native, Hungary is second in place neck to neck with Greece, with 93% of survey respondents reporting to use cannabis with tobacco.
That is nearly everyone, and although I am not surprised, I am very disappointed.
Even in Holland, with a well-established cannabis culture and a history of cannabis acceptance, 89% of survey respondents reported using tobacco with cannabis.
Now, I live in Australia and I see the same bad habit here, although not as widespread as it is in Europe. Even though Aussies use bongs more than any other country, they often even mix tobacco into cannabis as they load it into a bong. Mixing yandi with some baccy is especially popular in Aboriginal communities, but surely not limited to them as about 45% of cannabis users reported mixing tobacco with cannabis.
Fortunately, for New Zealand, they reported just about half of the Australian number, with ‘only’ 23% using tobacco while getting high.
The bad habit seems to be a lot less established in North America with 17% of Canadians and only 8% of US residents reporting tobacco use with their cannabis.
A lot of people smoke tobacco this way while they are nonsmokers otherwise. As a matter of fact, according to Dr. Adam R Winstock, Managing Director at Global Drug Survey, young people are often introduced to tobacco in a joint, making cannabis effectively a gateway drug to tobacco. Cannabis has been claimed to be a gateway drug to dangerous drugs by prohibitionist over the decades and has been proven over and over again that it isn’t, however it may be to some degree to tobacco due to the habit of mixing the two substances.
Mixing tobacco into cannabis may alter the therapeutic effects of cannabis and tobacco dependence can, of course, develop over time.
There is no need nor benefit in adding tobacco to cannabis for any reason.
The use of tobacco with cannabis may have evolved from necessity in terms of having a limited amount of cannabis available and also perhaps the need to ‘mask’ the obvious smell of a joint burning.
This could explain how spliffs were born, however blunts were born out of enjoyment as many people (especially smokers) may mix the two as they enjoy both.
If you are not sure what the difference is between joints, spliffs, and blunts, you can find it out here.
There seems to be an obvious need for governments to focus more on education to ensure people are aware of the available cannabis consumption methods and how they may apply to anyone.
Obviously, the lack of such education is a byproduct of the failed war on drugs and changes need to be made to the drug policies before anything like that would happen in Europe or Australia.
This is a similar issue to what users are facing with cannabis contamination, there is not much that is being done, while cannabis is still demonized by governments.
What we can all do is to educate our fellow patients and cannabis users and point out the damage that mixing their cannabis may present to their health and in a subtle way mention that it is just a habit that can be easily changed.
Best for your health is always to refuse to smoke anything, and get started with vaporizing.
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
I have a bachelor degree of Agricultural Science and have studied plant production for 8 years. Meanwhile, I learned so much about plants that it was hard to miss the outstanding (quite incredible) qualities of this hugely versatile plant.
After university I went on to build a career and recently I had the opportunity to return to this most passionate area of my life and have been writing about a wide variety of topics on Cannabis and Hemp.
- Nimbin Medican – Educating Australians About Medical Cannabis - January 28, 2020
- Pill Testing and Roadside Drug Testing – When is it Appropriate to Test for Drugs? - August 2, 2019
- The Australian Cannabis Summit in Review - July 16, 2019
