Vaporized cannabis includes the use of vape pens, dab rigs and desktop
vaporizers like volcano medic vaporizer. In comparison, vaporized and
smoked THC have similar pharmacokinetics profiles but on contrary,
vaporizers produce higher THC concentrations compared to smoked cannabis
resulting to greater THC concentrations in blood, drug effect, mouth
dryness and dry irritated eyes when same doses are smoked and
vaped.16 Oral methods include techniques that
administer cannabis through the mouth such as edibles and tinctures. For
instance, edible are drinks, foods and lozenges which have been infused
with THC while tinctures include liquid cannabis extracts consumed by
placing 3-4 drops under the tongue and gets immediately absorbed into
the body.15 Consequently, marijuana products are
classified as liquids (butane, hash oil, distillate), soft solids (wax,
budder), and hard solids (shatter, crumble).
3.2 Emerging chemicals from marijuana and their cancer
potency
A good number of scientific research have extensively identified the
chemical composition of marijuana smoke and evidently showed that there
exists a close similarity in chemical composition between second hand
marijuana and tobacco smoke with major differences being component
concentrations variations with remarkably similar chemicals including
but not limited to nitric oxides and aldehydes which have been proven to
cause detrimental health effects.18 A variety of toxic
molecular compounds isolated from marijuana and their classification are
presented in Table 2.
Table 2 Some carcinogenic chemical compounds reported present
in marijuana