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