Cannabis can kill, German study reveals

Smoking marijuana can kill you, a study from German scientists has revealed.

Scientists at University Hospital Dusseldorf conducted a study on 15 people whose deaths were linked to marijuana use, and found two men who died from cannabis poisoning alone.

Both men died of cardiac arrhythmia, when the heart beats too fast or too slow, and the scientists concluded this was solely due to cannabis use, New Scientist reports.

"It's a diagnosis of exclusion so you have to rule out all other possibilities," Dr Benno Hartung said.

"We did every test we could."

One of the men was an athletic 28-year-old found dead by his girlfriend.

The other man was a healthy 23-year-old.

The study comes a month after a coroner in the United Kingdom ruled that a 31-year-old woman had died from a marijuana overdose.

While smoking cannabis has been linked to heart conditions or respiratory cancers, a 2011 UK Department of Health report had concluded that no-one had ever died from a marijuana overdose.

Dr Hartung said that deaths from marijuana were still "a very rare event".