Does Marijuana Use Cause Heart Disease?

A new study rings alarm bells, but we might just be paranoid.

If you’re an epidemiologist trying to explore whether some exposure is a risk factor for a disease, you can run into a tough problem when your exposure of interest is highly correlated with another risk factor for the disease. For decades, this sort of stymied investigations into the link, if any, between marijuana use and cardiovascular disease because, for decades, most people who used marijuana in some way also smoked cigarettes — which is a very clear risk factor for heart disease.

But the times they are a-changing.

Thanks to the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in many states and even broader social trends, there is now a large population of people who use marijuana but do not use cigarettes. That means we can start to determine whether marijuana use is an independent risk factor for heart disease.