Cannabis 'could kill 30,000 a year'
Thirty thousand Britons a year might eventually die from cannabis smoking, doctors claimed last night.
They called for a battle against the drug to mirror that belatedly waged against tobacco, saying that it too could soon pose a major public health hazard.
Their warning, made in an editorial in the British Medical Journal, is the most high-profile attempt yet to alert authorities to public health difficulties that might result from an apparently more liberal attitude to the drug.
The authors, from Imperial College London and St Mary's hospital, London, argued that 120,000 deaths are caused among 13 million tobacco smokers each year, from cancers, respiratory disorders and heart and lung disease. If the health effects were the same, the corresponding figure from 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30,000.
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