Secondhand Marijuana Smoke?

In concerts, at house parties, even in the hallway of apartment buildings, you may have come into contact and been exposed to secondhand marijuana smoke. In situations like these, people often worry how breathing someone else’s marijuana smoke affects them.  A couple of common questions and the answers may help you see through the fog of this smoky situation. Can you get high from inhaling secondhand marijuana smoke? Probably not.  You may have heard the phrase “contact high,” about someone breathing secondhand marijuana smoke and feeling a buzz.    There have been studies that show in extreme conditions, with lots of smoke blown directly into your face, you can feel the high and it can even show up in a urine test. But this is not a normal circumstance. Studies show that very little THC is exhaled back into the air when a smoker exhales. So little, in fact, that if you sat in a room while people exhaled the smoke of four marijuana cigarettes (sometimes called joints) in one hour, you wouldn’t get high.  You would have to be trapped in a room breathing the smoke of 16 burning joints before it you started to show signs of being high.  Can you fail a drug test from inhaling secondhand marijuana smoke? Again, probably not. Since the amount of THC exhaled by marijuana smokers is so low, it would take a lot of secondhand exposure to fail a drug test.  In a 2010 study, researchers measured the effect of secondhand marijuana smoke on non-marijuana smokers.  The non...
Source: NIDA Drugs and Health Blog - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs