Marijuana harms your Lung System by drying up your fluid metabolism from the level of the Lungs. It damages your Thin Fluids and degenerates your Lungs’ ability to distribute Thin Fluids throughout your entire body. Marijuana coats your Lungs with Hot Poisons, which toxifies them and the rest of your body over time. Marijuana damages your Lung Yin, and with it the foundation of the Yin of the rest of your body. Marijuana radically depletes your Qi, confuses and devitalizes your Immune System and will tend to damage first the most compromised and constitutionally deficient areas of your body and psyche.

Marijuana begins to burn up your Yin the instant you take it. The first level of Yin it attacks is your Lung and Stomach fluids. When your Lung fluids dry up, the effect you feel right away is cottonmouth.

If you smoke marijuana, you might develop some of the same respiratory problems that other smokers do. Marijuana is a lot more resinous than tobacco is. It’s difficult for your Lungs to deal with marijuana resin, even though you might not smoke it in gigantic quantities. There’s a typical kind of chronic cough, wheezing, phlegm and bronchitis that marijuana smokers can work up over time. Other breathing problems can come along with it as well.

Marijuana harms your Lung System by:
  1. The physical heat of the smoke, which is very harsh on your delicate Lung tissue and damaging to the tissues of your throat.
  2. The residues that the smoke leaves in your Lungs that your body then tries to clean out.
  3. The Hot and Toxic nature of the marijuana itself, which burns up your Lung Yin and other deeper levels of fluids and Yin as it makes its way deeper into your body.

This final effect occurs whether you smoke marijuana or ingest it. This is because marijuana’s Hot nature burns up your Yin, beginning with the Thin Fluids of your Stomach and Lung. These Thin Fluids are the basis of all the deeper Yin fluids and functions in your body.

When marijuana burns up your Thin Fluids it affects your general fluid metabolism. Your Lung’s function of dispersing Thin Fluids gets compromised, and patches of fluid become isolated and stagnant, which creates Phlegm. Phlegm in Chinese Medicine is different than what we call phlegm. Phlegm can lodge and foul any of your organs and force them to lose their functions. Most of all, Phlegm distorts your perceptions and removes you from your natural objective feedback cycle with life. We’ll talk more about Phlegm in the section on Shen.

As Marijuna burns up your Lung Yin it also pollutes your Lungs with Hot Toxic Poisons. When this process begins, it takes a tremendous amount of energy from your body to accommodate this new Fiery element into your system. The presence of marijuana in your body and life will soon begin to damage your Qi, leaving you with a sense of sleepiness and lethargy.

Over time, this process will deplete your Qi to the point that it confuses and compromises your Immune System. Once that happens, marijuana’s Poison will go straight to the most compromised and deficient areas of your constitution and harm the combined functions of all your organs and Shen.

One of the classics of Chinese Medicine, The Golden Mirror, states, “In the beginning of a disease, the state of the Shen is important. This is because if the Shen is strong at the beginning of a disease, the pathogenic factors will not defeat the Upright Qi because it is strong. If the Shen is dull, it shows that the Upright Qi cannot resist pathogenic factors as it is deficient.” This leads us to our next topic, which is damage to the Wei Qi and Immune Function.

If you use marijuana on a regular basis you might develop an immune deficiency on top of your respiratory problems. Chronic marijuana users often come to my clinic with colds, various forms of pneumonia and other infections.

Marijuana’s chronic weakening of your immune system isn’t limited to your respiratory immune function. In the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine , we know that THC increases your chances of developing other kinds of infections as well.Even modern Western Medicine agrees that THC inhibits immune responses.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, we say that marijuana confuses your Wei Qi. Wei Qi grants you immunity from external pathological invasions. It is the Qi that flows along the external surfaces of your body. Marijuana confuses your Wei Qi because:

  1. It harms your Lungs on a physical level in the ways we’ve already described.
  2. Your Lung Qi controls the surface of your body and your Wei Qi. Your Lung Qi becomes confused because the psychoactive qualities of marijuana confound and exasperate your Po, which is a kind of natural intelligence that resides in your Lungs.
  3. Marijuana affects your Blood in a way that disturbs the distribution of your layers of Qi, Blood and body fluids. Marijuana confuses the way your body normally arranges these very specific layers from your Blood up to the surface of your skin and Intestines so they can’t perform their normal functions.
  4. Marijuana’s effect of burning up your digestive fluids compromises your entire fluid mechanism. We’ll go into detail about how this happens in the next level. Your body normally uses these fluids to whisk away impurities that lead to infection.
  5. Marijuana causes a specific kind of mental confusion that damages your Spleen’s centralizing function. When the Spleen loses its centralizing power, all your body systems’ functions decrease.
  6. Marijuana’s effects on your Kidney System use all available Kidney Qi, Yang and Yin to manage your high. Your body normally uses this Kidney Yang Qi as the foundation for your Wei Qi, and Kidney Yin to support the health of your mucous membranes.

All of these factors point in a single direction: Marijuana confuses and damages your Wei Qi and Immune Functions.

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