Different level of toxicity between smoke

Question

Has there been studies on the difference between the smoke generated from:

• cigarette or cigar manufactured by brands which are proven to contain more than a hundred of dangerous additional components
• tobacco/marijuana (more or less pure?)/any-plant-dried-leaves made cigarettes.

Apart from the nicotine both contain naturally, are the latter safer to inhale? in which scale?

The other question Effects of smoking tobacco compared to inhaling other smoke, reminds the danger of all source of intoxication, wall paints are also to consider.. and outdoors gas pipes, etc... But I'm doing a fixation on smoked drugs. I've been living in residences, sharing corridors with flats with more or less important smoke concentration, and had developped fumiphobia (but this is out of topic).

This is probably psychological but I'd never stay in the same room than someone smoking, but if someone take some dried leaves out of a plant,.. roll them in paper, fire it and inspire it. It never happened but I wouldn't be as much scared by the generated smoke. But if a study would show that manufactured cigarettes are between 1.5 and 3 times more 'toxic' then I would consider both cases dangerous.

Answer 1

I am not sure, if any comparisions have been made with other plant leaves, but unless these contain some pharmacologic active substances, I doubt that they are smoked widely. There are comparisions between normal smoking and the smoking of marijuana and the short version is: Both are harmful. It depends on the temperature at which they are burned, how they where grown and so on. For smoking marijuana it also depends if you mix it with tobacco... This fact sheet from the University of Washington lists a number of points on marijuana together with proper references. Then there are some articles about smoking and marijuana in comparision:

• A Comparison of Mainstream and Sidestream Marijuana and Tobacco Cigarette Smoke Produced under Two Machine Smoking Conditions
• On the Carcinogenicity of Marijuana Smoke
• A possible chemical basis for the higher mutagenicity of marijuana smoke as compared to tobacco smoke
• Is frequent marijuana smoking harmful to health?