Going on 13 years without a smoke, since my kid was on the way. Now I wonder how I ever started that dumb habit in the first place. Can’t stand to be anywhere near it anymore.
I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations.
Warnings went on cigarettes in 1964. I was born in 1966. I’ve watched people develop COPD, etc
Someone in the family needing oxygen in their 50s wasn’t enough to scare the few remaining smokers.
Remember when people were going to stop going to bars when smoking was banned indoors?
Now take something that’s not as obvious as smoking and try to convince people they’re wrong.
First, addictions are a terrifyingly complicated health problem. They involve and hijack ancient reward paths in our brain. Stop breathing for 30 seconds and watch your reactions. Some people react in the same way to withdrawals. Are you weak-willed or stupid if you cannot hold your breath for a minute?
Second, some people make money on addictions. That is where "stupid" definitely leaves the conversation and "evil" enters it. And it is not just stereotypical mafiosi peddling fentanyl. How many HNers spend their working hours making some app slightly more addictive to the users? Do they consider themselves evil?
These people have an enormous incentive to play down the risks and try to hook up new users to their products. Be it tobacco, gin, Facebook...
If no one made money on smoking, it would be a niche activity by now.
>If no one made money on smoking, it would be a niche activity by now.
That is an interesting thought and I'm not so sure. Some things are self sustaining cultural practices. Maybe it depends on how you scope the idea. If the companies went non-profit and taxes were cut, it would be very cheap and I don't think advertising does anything anymore.
I think the same is largely true for alcohol as well
Advertising seems more about market share than converting users.
I meant "niche" in the same sense as fishing is. About 2 per cent of Czechs are fishers. At least 15 times as many smoke.
That said, I was too vague. There is a huge difference between the world where production of tobacco was never profitable vs. where production of tobacco, hypothetically, stopped being profitable yesterday.
Yeah, that was another thought I had. If profit it was somehow prevented all the way down to farmers and distribution, then I think use would be extremely niche. Few people would be interested in growing and manufacturing their own tobacco.
That said, I think this speaks more to how profit is the engine of commerce, and otherwise we would all be subsistence farmers.
In the never profitable case, it is interesting to think about native American use prior to the Colombian exchange. If Native American cultivation was a profitable activity is debatable, but not particularly interesting to me, so lets set that aside.
My understanding is that it was used fairly heavily in a social setting. It seems reasonable that this would still have propagated rather quickly. It reminds me that smoking spread throughout Europe and the near east without TV, billboards, or hallmarks of modern advertising - and how deeply it imbedded itself in the cultures there.
Similarly, I would argue that Alcohol predates advertising and predates currency itself.
We should try to follow recommendations from health professionals to the best of our ability.
However if I followed every doctor's recommendation, I would just be taking care of my health every waking hour. I would be very healthy and fit, but I wouldn't have the time to actually enjoy my life.
I don't think humans are categorically stupid. I think they have individual goals, and therefore can't just blindly follow all recommendations. They don't have a trusted administrator input setting, and that's a good thing.
Instead, they need to judge and assess instructions on an ongoing basis. This can be a messy process, but there's no better alternative in a world where you receive instructions from other flawed humans with agendas that differ from your own.
Smoking is fun. Nicotine is great. People who say otherwise are lying. I miss smoking, but it's not something I think about a lot.
Let's put it this way. People do things because they get something out of it, and they stop when the cost is too high for the benefit they get. Saying addiction is terrible, well, it's not terrible for the person doing it. It's great.
Addiction is just a word for "behavior we don't like."
I was a heavy smoker for the better part of two decades and I agree with half of what you said. Parts of smoking were great, and I miss them dearly. I quit because the totality wasn't great for me, and I felt like it hadn't been in a long time.
Where I disagree is the part about quitting and addiction. The best definition of addiction I ever received was from psychologist friend who said addiction is when a behavior is in conflict with you and your life goals. As such, it is really only a judgment someone can make about themselves. It is "a personal behavior that I don't like". I don't think outsiders have standing to decide what is best for others.
This seems good but also bad. Like its great that quitting will always give you extra years, but it also means if you delay quitting, you still get those extra years. So why not delay a bit longer... (I know why this is bad logic, but to a nicotine-addicted mind, this reasoning could be very tempting)
Smoking is one of the nastiest habits society has acquired. Twenty years ago it looked like smoking was on the way out, but recent trends are troubling and show how weak we are in the face of determined actors with financial motives.
Facts like these are good to see, because every little bit of incentive to help people stop smoking is needed. The trouble however is not getting people started in the first place…
The downwards trend of the percentage of people who smoke is stagnating, and recent research has shown that the way people pick up smoking is, predictably and indeed, by stepping up from vaping. The short summary is that for susceptible young teenagers vaping is cool, and then when they turn 15 or 16, vaping is too childish, and 'real' smoking is where it's at. Smoking is still 'cool', and now even 'retro-cool'. By that time they are quite addicted to nicotine, so it's either vaping, tobacco smoking, or quitting. The latter of course being really hard at that age. Big tobacco won this round.
It's not all bad of course. Smoking has been successfully banished from lots of places. This varies by country, but I for one really appreciate not having to breath smoke in public transport, offices, shops, restaurants, and bars, and not having to see parents smoke on the school grounds (thereby denormalizing smoking for children). I saw society change in that regard, and it is positive.
But I loathe the people who kept delaying acting on vapes taking over part of our youth and keeping them smoking for the foreseeable future.
A quick google suggests to me that smoking trends are still falling in the US and globally on average. imo smoking is considered lame to americans as a sign that someone doesn't have their shit together.
>predictably and indeed, by stepping up from vaping.
Do you have any citations for this? I don't know any vapers in the younger generation who switched to cigarettes who hadn't already picked up the cigarette habit.
Looking further, I don't see any uptick in cigarette smoking rates.
I'm not sure if any specific scientific research points out this link, but it has been suspected for a while based on anecdotal evidence. The interviews in the newspaper article are examples of that (and not limited to this one news source).
The stagnation of the downward trend has been documented though:
Really this is one of the more useless statistics. It's pretty much impossible to OD unless you're a toddler and you accidentally drink juice.
What matters is the affects small amounts of nicotine, repeatedly, have over time. Nicotine increases blood pressure and so it slowly destroys your cardiovascular system. Smoking is, of course, bad for your lungs.
The combination of lung damage and heart damage is deadly. Typically heart failure will require more oxygen in your blood to make up for the fact your heart doesn't work. But the lungs are bad at extracting oxygen when they have pulmonary damage.
Maybe not a useful statistic, but it's definitely 100% not harmless in the correct dosage. It has been successfully used for both murder and suicide. Being water-soluble, just soak tobacco leaves in water and you'll eventually be able to extract a useful amount.
I smoked for >20 years, quit for 10, then started again when dealing with grief after my partner passed away, and smoked for another 10. I get it, literally: high-blood pressure, etc. Although, when quitting, it was always the tar that really drove me crazy.
Another thing I've realized, is that smoking is a double-whammy vector towards heart disease: smoking promotes heart disease directly, but smoking also promotes gum disease, and gum disease promotes heart disease.
And the child-friendly flavours (bubblegum ice blast! crème brûlée! strawberry!) and packaging just plain immoral.
Oddly, nicotine as such is not that harmful, comparatively. It's the addiction (and the potential to escalate to inhaling carcinogens) which makes it so bad.
Chewing tobacco is harmful too, and there you are not inhaling anything. Nicotine is harmful in itself. (that is why plants make it - it tends to kill predators. Humans are just large enough that it dilutes in our body by enough to not kill)
Nicotine poisoning is possible, but not for adults at normal dosages. It's all the other crap your inhaling, sucking, or melting which is carcinogenic or otherwise directly harmful. Taking nicotine regularly isn't that healthy, but the reason nicotine is bad is really mostly down to its addictive nature.
Not with clear numbers, but with clear qualifiers:
> But to an individual, inactivity is certainly _not_ worse than smoking.
> Being inactive increases the risk of a number of diseases, including a several types of cancer. Smoking _massively_ increases the risk of over a dozen types of cancer, as well as causing emphysema, heart disease, stroke and other diseases.
I wouldn't be so sure... Or rather I'm not sure it's that simple.
If you compare yourself with someone that's sedentary but also not eating right, than yeah, possibly you're even with an overweight non-smoker, overweight being linked to so many diseases... But if you compare yourself to someone sedentary that eats properly, or let's say as well as you do, for the sake of good comparaison... I wouldn't be so sure... The damage you do to your lungs and heart tissues are unlikely to be offset by the little time that you spend at the gym or on your bike...
This coming from an also fairly active smoker (now vaper).
Most of the data on smoking risk when I studied it was measured in packs per day, so I don't think there is a lot of hard data for your situation.
I was a long time chain smoker for decade until one day I quit cold turkey. Now Ill buy a pack of rolling tobacco once a year for camping and seem to be happy with that.
I'd say switch to snus or snuff or something to mitigate lung damage. My only vice is snus, I don't touch caff/alc/weed/etc - my anecdata as someone who spent the majority of their life highly active and a non-tobacco user is it affects my tendon healing rate negatively. For ex. when I do lots of handstands or planche work my distal biceps tendon seems to take longer to become fresh again vs. when I was not using snus. However, snus vs. caffeine my sleep is miles better and I often wake up infinitely more refreshed than I do when I used caff, so I ultimately am choosing snus for now.
Quit smoking, gained 30+ kg of weight, was a cardiology patient, high bp, kidney issues, depression, etc. It was horrible.
Restarted smoking, lost the kilos in several months, started hiking and biking. Ended up climbing lots of mountains and now practicing endurance sports and alpinism, doing things which were unimaginable 10 years ago.
Haven't seen a doctor in years.
Still 'pack a day' smoker.
Not condoning or recommending, just my story for perspective.
I don't think it's about comparing yourself to other people with different habits, but to your future-self. I quit a long time ago and only after realized how motivated reasoning was influencing me as a smoker.
Yeah. One day I found a sign outside a co-worker's cubicle. It said:
"I am attempting to quit smoking. I am a Vietnam vet and I have worked at the Post Office. All that stands between you and sudden death is this silly little patch I am wearing. Be very kind to me."
He successfully quit. Didn't kill anyone, either - at least, not at work...
