“With mild or moderate usage, no extra charge is usually needed if the applicant has not had any adverse effects,” Thomas Gangemi, vice president and chief underwriter, said in an e-mail. “For heavy recreational use, we may assign a substandard debit.”
Six Joints
Transamerica classifies people who smoke marijuana less than once a month, on average, in the same way as occasional cigar smokers, said Greg Tucker, a spokesman for the company. That’s a better rate than a cigarette smoker.
“There are some carriers, if you smoke six marijuana joints a year, you would be treated the same as a cigarette smoker,” he said. “We define ‘occasional’ a little more generously.”
Munich Re’s Moore compared weed to alcohol, which is used responsibly by many people without incurring additional insurance costs. Both drinking and pot smoking, however, can impair judgment in ways that cigarettes do not, he said.
“If somebody is drinking two glasses of wine a day consistently and they aren’t showing adverse health effects, they’d pay the same premium rate as someone not drinking alcohol,” Moore said. “But if they’re smoking two, three, four joints a day, that frequency of use would likely cause an additional charge to their premium.”
Dependence, Addiction
Cigarette smoking harms almost every organ of the body and causes more than 480,000 deaths a year in the U.S., a greater total than alcohol, illegal drugs, car accidents and gun incidents combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The government’s Office of National Drug Control Policy says that chronic use of marijuana may increase the risk of schizophrenia in vulnerable people. It also cites research linking frequent marijuana smoking to respiratory illnesses and said that long-term use can lead to dependence and addiction.
“While the scientific community has yet to achieve full consensus on this matter, the majority of epidemiological and animal data demonstrate that the reinforcing properties of marijuana in humans is low in comparison to other drugs of abuse, including alcohol and nicotine,” according to Norml, a group seeking to reform marijuana laws.