Disclaimer: Names have been changed to protect the embarrassed.

Cannabis advocates often preach that marijuana is safer than alcohol. By all accounts, it is. It’s safer than a lot of stuff. But it wouldn’t be accurate to claim that having an affinity for weed was without its perils.

The cannabis clan will always fight tooth and nail to convince the American public that using pot is less hazardous than drinking booze, but they usually fail to mention the times they got hurt smoking it.

Oh, sure, maybe the incident didn’t land them in the emergency room (maybe it did), but they got stoned and, well, something about the experience caused pain.

And when the cannabis industry itself overlooks the drawbacks of weed, then really they’re no better than Big Tobacco.

Thankfully, unlike the tales typically told from the bottom of the bottle, these super blazed accounts are mostly peppered with humor, not tragedy. What can we say? Getting a boo-boo smoking bud is just par for the course.

We recently talked to members of stoned society to learn more about the occasions when they sustained an injury using weed.

#1) Weird Burns

Not surprisingly, after dozens of interviews, it seems the bulk of these marijuana mishaps are burned-related. Lips, fingers, tongues, and chests, mostly. But for Rodney, a 45-year-old stockbroker from Indiana, it was the family jewels that got scorched.

“I was sitting on the toilet, like I used to do every morning before work, taking hits from the bathroom bong,” he told The Bluntness.

“Some hot ash fell out of the bowl when I was hitting it and landed right on my crotch. Oh man, I ended up with a nasty burn a little too close to my junk. Needless to say, I don’t wake and bake much anymore, but when I do I keep my pants on.”

Good idea, Rodney!

What happens, though, when the burn is internal? Kelsey, a 32-year-old from Arlington, Virginia, claims there’s a come to Jesus moment. It’s as though a stoned monk from the mountains of Tibet appears with the message: Sometimes you smoke the weed, sometimes the weed smokes you.

“So, I'm hiking with two of my friends in Connecticut,” she tells us. “One doesn't smoke but one brought a blunt. We sat on a giant boulder to smoke and as it gets shorter, we decide to move on a little up the trail.”

As the three continued hiking, Kelsey was unaware that she was about to need the Heimlich maneuver.

“We are walking up this slight incline. I'm third in line and I've got the roach, trying to get the last of it,” she said. “I ended up accidentally sucking it in as I'm breathing. I'm now choking on a lit roach on this trail. I start coughing. My friends are joking that I can't die because no one has died from weed, and I can't be the start of the statistics. I get it out, and I ended up burning both of my tonsils.”

#2) Coughing Jags Gone Horribly Wrong

Listen, it has been said, if you don’t cough, you don’t get off. What they don’t tell you is a cannabis coughing jag can go south.

“A friend of ours had to be rushed to the hospital after literally collapsing a lung coughing so hard after a dabbing,” asserts Katherine from Ontario, Canada.

#3) Confusing Head Trauma

There are times, too, when coughing up a lung (or collapsing it) is a prequel to puking and passing out.

“I projectile vomited from a massive bong rip in college and fainted,” declares a 33-year-old former frat boy from North Carolina. “Evidently, no one even tried to slow my fall. I had a gash on the side of my head, and it was bleeding.”

Indeed, it is sometimes best to take those gargantuan ganja hits sitting down. That’s the best advice Steve from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, can offer. Remain seated at all times, especially if you’re tall. “I took a massive bong hit, stood up to exhale and slammed my head on the shelving above.”

#4) Losing An Eye!

On occasion, toker trauma can go from tame to pretty wild, far exceeding the pitfalls like a few burns, a concussion, and a smoke-filled pneumothorax. One man we talked to told us the harrowing account of one of his friends losing an eye. “A seed popped in the pipe like popcorn,” he said.

Damn, we’ve heard of having a safety meeting, but we didn’t realize we actually needed one. Guess it’s a good thing the pot growers of today have mastered the art of seedless weed.

#5) A Subconscious Death Wish

Still, science can’t protect against recklessness, a lack of common sense and a subconscious death wish.

“A few years ago, I was having some fun with some friends,” 35-year-old Simon tells The Bluntness. “We didn't have a rig, but I've always been creative, right? Without looking what I was using for a dabber, I picked up the .22 bullet (my friend was using it to pack down bowls) and got a nice dab onto it.”

Now, of course, Simon admits he wasn’t thinking that his bullet dabbing method might not be the highest level of stoner ingenuity ever imagined, but he proceeded with it anyway. “I'm heating up the bullet and it explodes, going right through my left nostril,” he claims.

“I didn't even feel it split my nose down the middle. I heard the bang and felt my neck snap backwards. The bullet would have scrambled my brain if it was one centimeter to the right. I'm extremely lucky to be alive.”

The distressing accounts from the doob are never ending. There are people who credit the breaking of bones to being too high to properly navigate the mud; getting cut on broken glass after haphazardly stepping on the bong following a blinding hit.

Some dude even nearly burned himself alive in his father’s tool shed during a dab excursion gone wrong.

Nope, there’s no shortage of people out there in this wild world getting hurt while getting high. Just remember, cannabis might be safer than alcohol, but humans will always find a way to make it just as treacherous.

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