Is Vaping Healthier Than Smoking? What 8 Years Did to My Lungs (And Wallet)

The Question I Get Asked Most

"But is it actually healthier?"

I've been asked this hundreds of times. By mates considering switching. By strangers in my DMs. By my mum, who's convinced anything involving cannabis is equally terrible regardless of delivery method. By Sarah, who tolerates my use but would prefer I wasn't inhaling anything. By my own GP indirectly, in the appointment that tipped me into switching in 2018, and again at follow-up six weeks later when she'd rather gracefully moved on from the lecture. Eight years on, she's moved on to grumbling about my knees.

It's the question that matters most, and it's the one that gets the worst answers online. You'll find:

• Marketing sites claiming vaping is "100% safe" (it isn't)
• Anti-cannabis sources claiming it's "just as bad as smoking" (it isn't)
• Clickbait conflating dry herb vaporizers with the EVALI lung injury outbreak (completely different thing)
• Forum posts with strong opinions and zero citations
• Actual research papers that require a PhD to interpret

What you won't easily find is an honest middle ground: what the evidence shows, what we genuinely don't know yet, and what eight years of daily dry herb vaping did to one person's body. This is that article. I'll give you the science, then I'll give you my experience, and I'll be clear about which is which.

First: What Are We Actually Comparing?

This matters more than people realise. When I talk about "vaping" in this article, I mean dry herb vaporisation — heating ground cannabis flower below combustion temperature, releasing cannabinoids and terpenes as vapour without burning the plant material.

I am NOT talking about:

• Oil/concentrate cartridges — different products, different chemistry, different risk profile. The EVALI outbreak involved contaminated oil cartridges, not dry herb devices.
• Nicotine e-cigarettes — completely different substance, different use patterns, different health considerations.
• Dabbing/high-temperature concentrates — much higher temperatures, different exposure profile.

When headlines say "vaping is dangerous," they're almost never referring to temperature-controlled dry herb vaporizers. The distinction is crucial.

And when I compare "vaping vs smoking," I specifically mean vaping cannabis flower versus smoking cannabis flower (usually in a spliff with tobacco, as is common in the UK). I'm not comparing vaping to not using cannabis at all — that's a different question with a different answer.

The Evidence: What Happens When You Don't Burn Things

The Chemistry Is Clear

Combustion — burning plant material — creates hundreds of compounds that don't exist in the original plant. When you light a spliff, you're not just releasing what's in the cannabis. You're creating new chemicals through the burning process itself.

Here's what temperature-controlled vaporisers (like the Volcano) produce compared to smoke from the same flower at ~180–200°C:

Compound	Vapour	Smoke
Tar	Near-zero	Abundant
Carbon monoxide	Near-zero	Significant
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)	Largely absent	Multiple carcinogenic PAHs
Benzene, toluene, naphthalene	Eliminated or dramatically reduced	Present
Cannabinoid share of output	~95% (mostly THC, some CBN)	Non-cannabinoids up to 88% of total content
Identified compounds in output	Trace volatiles, terpenes, plant oils	Over 111 identified chemicals

Vapour is mostly what you want. Smoke is mostly what you don't.

Where the "95% Safer" Claim Comes From

You'll see this number quoted everywhere. Here's the actual origin: the "95% less harmful" figure comes from a 2015 expert review commissioned by Public Health England — but it was about nicotine e-cigarettes versus tobacco cigarettes, not cannabis vaping versus cannabis smoking.

The reasoning was: remove combustion, remove most of the harm, because most smoking-related disease comes from inhaling combustion byproducts rather than the nicotine itself.

Mechanistically, the same harm-reduction logic applies to cannabis — no tobacco, no combustion, sharply reduced tar and carbon monoxide. But cannabis brings different considerations: higher THC concentrations than in the past, different use patterns, mental health and dependence risks that differ from nicotine.

The honest framing: for cannabis, lab data suggest toxin reductions in the same ballpark as the famous PHE e-cigarette figure. But nobody credible is putting an exact percentage on it yet, because the long-term outcome studies don't exist.

The Evidence: What Happens to Your Lungs

Short-Term Improvements

The respiratory evidence for switching from smoking to vaping is encouraging, even if imperfect.

Earleywine & Barnwell (2007): a study of cannabis users found that vaporiser users were approximately 40% less likely to report respiratory symptoms — cough, phlegm, chest tightness — compared to non-vaporiser cannabis users, after adjusting for tobacco use and consumption amount.

Switching trials: short-term studies where smokers switch exclusively to vaporisers show improvements in respiratory symptoms and some lung function measures within weeks to months.

The mechanism makes sense: if you remove tar, particulate matter, and combustion byproducts from what you're inhaling, your airways have less irritation to respond to. Coughing, mucus production, and inflammation decrease.

What the Long-Term Data Shows (And Doesn't)

Here's where I have to be honest about the limits.

What we do have: strong mechanistic evidence (remove combustion → remove combustion toxins), short-term respiratory symptom improvement data, and cross-sectional studies suggesting better respiratory profiles in vapers vs smokers.

What we don't have: definitive proof that 30 years of daily dry herb vaping won't cause problems we haven't anticipated, clear thresholds for "safe" frequency or temperature, or long-term data on cannabis-only populations (most studies mix vaping methods and include tobacco users).

The honest position: everything we know suggests dry herb vaping is substantially less harmful to your respiratory system than smoking. But "substantially less harmful" is not the same as "harmless," and we can't yet quantify the long-term risks with precision.

What We Don't Know (The Honest Uncertainty)

I could write an article that only includes the reassuring evidence. That would be dishonest. Here's what the science hasn't resolved.

No Long-Term Outcome Data

I've said it already, but it bears repeating: we don't have 50-year studies. We're making educated projections based on toxicology and mechanism, not observing actual lifetime outcomes. The same was true for cigarettes in the 1950s. We turned out to be right that burning things and inhaling them is bad. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that we're still in relatively early days for vaporisation research.

Temperature Thresholds

Lab work shows that trace amounts of undesirable compounds (including benzene) can start appearing in vapour above roughly 200°C, especially as material dries out during a session. Above 230°C, you're approaching partial combustion — visible browning, charring, and the appearance of smoke-like toxins.

Device Quality Matters

Studies on cannabis vaping devices (mostly oil cartridges, but the principle applies) have found metal leaching — nickel, chromium, lead, copper — from device components into vapour, sometimes above health-based limits. This research is strongest for cheap, unregulated oil cartridges. But the underlying mechanism — heated metal parts and solders contaminating the airpath — could apply to poorly made dry herb devices too.

Practical implication: a well-made device from a reputable manufacturer with medical-grade materials and proper temperature control is meaningfully different from a £20 no-name import with questionable quality control.

Cannabis Itself Has Effects

Vaporisation eliminates combustion toxins. It doesn't eliminate the effects of cannabis. THC affects heart rate, blood pressure, cognition, and mental health. These effects exist regardless of delivery method. If you're concerned about cannabis's impact on anxiety, memory, motivation, or dependence — those concerns remain whether you smoke or vape.

The comparison is always "vaping vs smoking the same substance," not "vaping vs not using cannabis at all."

The EVALI Clarification (Why That Scare Doesn't Apply Here)

In 2019–2020, headlines screamed about "vaping-related lung injuries" sending people to hospital and killing dozens. If you're worried about this, you should understand what actually happened.

EVALI (E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury) was linked to vitamin E acetate — a thickening agent added to illicit THC oil cartridges, primarily in the United States. The CDC's investigation found:

• 82% of EVALI patients reported using THC-containing products
• Vitamin E acetate was identified in lung fluid samples from nearly all tested patients
• The outbreak was concentrated in products from informal sources (not regulated dispensaries)

What EVALI was: a contamination crisis in the illicit oil cartridge market. What EVALI was not: evidence that dry herb vaporizers are dangerous.

Dry herb vaporizers heat plant material. There's no liquid, no carrier oil, no cutting agents, no vitamin E acetate. The EVALI outbreak has essentially zero relevance to temperature-controlled dry herb vaporisation.

What 8 Years Did to My Body

Right. Enough studies. Here's n=1 data — my personal experience switching from spliffs (cannabis + tobacco) to dry herb vaporisation.

The Starting Point (2018)

Before switching, I'd smoked spliffs daily for nearly two decades. Cannabis mixed with tobacco, multiple times per day. I was thirty-four and genuinely believed that the morning cough, the wheezing stairs, the throat-clearing — all of it — was just "what bodies do now."

System	Baseline at 34
Respiratory	Productive morning cough; occasional wheeze on exertion; shortness of breath climbing stairs; regular throat clearing; frequent minor chest tightness
Cardiovascular	Could barely run for a bus without gasping; avoided stairs when lifts were available; accepted "getting older" as the reason — at thirty-four

The First Month

The first week was rough. I've written about this in detail in Your Lungs After 30 Days Smoke-Free, but the summary:

• Week 1: Increased coughing, more mucus than before. My body was apparently clearing out accumulated gunk. Unpleasant but apparently normal for people quitting smoking.
• Week 2: Coughing started to subside. Throat felt clearer. First hints that something was actually changing.
• Week 3: Morning cough noticeably reduced. Could take deeper breaths without triggering a coughing fit.
• Week 4: Morning cough essentially gone. Hadn't wheezed in two weeks. Climbed stairs without thinking about it for the first time in years.

The First Year

By month three, the morning cough was completely gone. Not reduced — absent. Something I'd accepted as permanent had simply stopped. By month six, I noticed I could run. Not marathons, but actually run — for the bus, up stairs, playing football with mates' kids — without feeling like my lungs were failing.

Years 2–7

The improvements from year one have held. Some things I've noticed:

• Respiratory: no morning cough (still, eight years later); no regular throat clearing; no wheeze during exertion; deep breaths fill the whole chest; cardio capacity dramatically better at forty-two than at thirty-four.
• What Sarah's noticed: "you don't cough anymore" (said with mild surprise), "you smell better" (no smoke smell on clothes, hair, fingers), "you can actually do things now" (referring to physical activities I'd have avoided before).

The "doing more than their share" / "doing approximately their share" line is hers. I still repeat it. It's the best turn of phrase I've ever heard in a GP's surgery.

The Honest Caveats

This is one person's experience. I changed two variables simultaneously: I stopped tobacco AND switched to vaporisation. The improvements could be:

• Entirely from quitting tobacco (most likely explanation for the dramatic changes)
• Partly from removing cannabis combustion (plausible contribution)
• Unrelated to either (unlikely given the timeline)

I can't isolate the vaporisation benefit from the tobacco cessation benefit. Most people in the UK who switch from spliffs to vapes are making the same combined change — quitting tobacco and cannabis combustion at once.

What I can say: my lungs are dramatically better than they were. The science suggests removing combustion from both substances is responsible. The timeline matched the switch exactly.

The Efficiency Reality (Your Wallet)

Health isn't the only consideration. Let's talk money.

The Extraction Difference

Studies on dry herb vaporisers show THC recovery rates of roughly 55–83% of available cannabinoids, depending on device and technique. Compare to joints, where significant cannabinoid mass is lost to:

• Sidestream smoke (the stuff curling off while you're not inhaling)
• Pyrolysis (destruction through burning)
• Roach loss (whatever you don't smoke)

Real-world joint efficiency is estimated at 25–30% — meaning most of what you paid for goes into the air or ash.

The practical translation: most evidence suggests 25–40% less flower needed for the same effect when vaping versus smoking.

My Actual Numbers

Period	Cannabis	Tobacco
Before (spliffs)	~2–3g per week	Daily, mixed with cannabis
After (vaping)	~1–1.5g per week for equivalent effect	Eliminated

That's roughly 40–50% reduction in cannabis consumption, plus complete elimination of tobacco spending.

Annual savings calculation: cannabis ~£50–75/month saved (UK prices), tobacco ~£40–60/month saved — total ~£100–125/month, or £1,200–1,500/year. Over eight years: £8,000–10,000 saved.

I've broken this down in detail in The Maths of Vaping: What Switching Actually Saved Me. The short version: it pays for itself almost immediately, then keeps paying. Want to see how much you could save? Use our savings calculator.

The AVB Bonus

Your "waste" from vaping isn't waste. AVB (already vaped bud) still contains cannabinoids — studies suggest it can retain a third or more of original THC content at moderate vaping temperatures. That's free edibles. I save all my AVB, infuse it occasionally, and get additional use from material I've already vaped. With smoking, your waste is ash. Literal ash.

(See The Lazy Person's Guide to AVB for what to do with it.)

The Framework I Use

Harm reduction, not harm elimination.

If you're going to use cannabis — and I am, for chronic pain and ADHD management — vaporisation is meaningfully better for your respiratory system than smoking it.

If you're currently smoking spliffs with tobacco, switching to vaping removes two sources of combustion toxins simultaneously. The health case for switching is strong. Blame the right plant.

If you're not currently using cannabis, the health case for starting — even via vaporisation — is different and involves different considerations.

My position after eight years: I breathe better, I cough less, my cardiovascular function is dramatically improved, and I've saved thousands of pounds. The science suggests this isn't coincidence. I'm confident the switch was right for me.

But I won't tell you it's "safe." Because I don't know what happens after 30 more years, and neither does anyone else.

If You're Considering Switching

Here's what I'd recommend based on everything above:

• Quality matters more than price. A well-made device with proper temperature control and clean materials is meaningfully safer than a cheap import with questionable manufacturing.
• Temperature matters. Stay in the 170–200°C range for the clearest harm-reduction benefits. Running everything at maximum heat erodes the advantage.
• Technique matters. Proper grinding, packing, and draw technique maximise efficiency and minimise waste.