The king of smokers • Hacker News Board

Re: The king of smokers

#51

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:56 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #50

nilkn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, then what, exactly, is "ordinary" air? Air that has no ill health effects? If so, then this has become a tautology -- obviously air that has no ill health effects has no ill health effects. If all such cases are conveniently excluded from the definition, then there's no point even talking about this. This is air that millions and millions of people breathe just by walking outside. Anyway, your observation that…

The upthread question about why inhaling smoke would be harmful if "ordinary air" was not pretty clearly used "ordinary air" to mean at least "air without smoke", since inhaling "smoke" is always inhaling "air with smoke", and it would be silly to ask the question if both alternatives meant "air with smoke".

[deleted]

Re: The king of smokers

#52

Post by justsaysmthng » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:59 PM UTC

HillaryBriss wrote: post #25

> [tobacco's] virtues rarely get a hearing, and yet the latter are many and great. To quiet nervous rest; to soothe a ruffled temper; to favour calm and partial thought; to steady and clear (not to cloud) a confused, overworked brain; to counteract the effects of physical exhaustion Taking this at face value, I wonder what impact such a drug could have on the productivity of a workforce, especially programmers. I als…

Albert Einstein was a smoker, as were a lot of other scientists.

NASA mission control celebrated with cigars when the mission was successful...

From my own experience, smoking sometimes helped me improve concentration and it gave me a 10 minute cigarette break every hour or so, during which I could do some out of the box thinking on the problem.

Tobacco is like a close friend/advisor which is always with you.

Had it not been for the health issues it provoked in me (circulatory/heart), I would still be smoking today.

Even as a non-smoker now, I still respect the plant and I'm grateful for our relationship which lasted for 20 years.

I think it has greatly influenced our (human) development. This is very hard to measure or prove, of course, but given the mystical status that shamans attribute to it ("most powerful plant in the jungle"), I would suspect that it had something to do with the giant expansion of human consciousness that we've experienced since it was introduced into "our" culture.

Good or bad, we don't know, it just did, since so many people use(d) it.

Here's an interesting take on the subject: http://realitysandwich.com/217970/meeting-the-tobacco-spirit...

Re: The king of smokers

#53

Post by likpok » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

Synaesthesia wrote: post #47

bogomipz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree I think the comparison has to be organic tobacco like pouch tobacco or American Spirits which don't have all the additives such as saltpeter, bromine and chlorine. Its hard to believe though that ingesting one type of smoke vs another is any better for you.

But tobacco itself is pernicious, and toxic - it's can be mixed with water and used as an insecticide.

Pure nicotine can be used as an insecticide and generally doesn't have the adverse-to-humans effects of smoking, so that's not really good evidence of tobacco being nasty.

There are other things you can mix with water and use an insecticide, too. Caffeine, for one. There are other reasons that we don't use it, but mostly practical ones (it washes away easily, it also kills things in the soil).

Re: The king of smokers

#54

Post by thirstytho » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #46

thirstytho wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the face, there are dramatic differences between cannabis and cigarette smoke, the most important being that cigarette smoke is highly addictive, the second most important that cigarette smoke has much lower potency. This is why our smoking/cancer statistics reflect a reality in which it was once extremely common for smokers to be inhaling one or more ounces of burned tobacco per day. Most people already know that…

I don't buy the logic in your last paragraph. Cannabis consumption in the US for the last ~80 years has been furtive. For most of the last 80 years, tobacco was as mainstream as Coca Cola. I don't think we can easily draw conclusions about lung disease from the facts we have available right now.

That's ok, it's not important to my point; it's just weak but confirmatory evidence of my prediction.

Still, after 80 years, how are you splitting responsibility for that between our laws and culture and the substance itself? Smoking cigarettes furtively is much more difficult than smoking weed furtively[0], due to the exact same two factors I pointed out previously.

If the same evidence that predicts you'll see less disease predicts you'll see fewer of the users, does not seeing as many users really count against the prediction of less disease? At the very least it seems like you'd have to assign some priors in order to know which way that evidence points.

[0] In the habitual sense, obviously.

Re: The king of smokers

#55

Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:09 PM UTC

ableal wrote: post #30

Bartweiss wrote: post #19

The "clever calculator" mentioned in the post is perhaps a bit less clever than suggested. 500,000 quarts of beer, spread evenly over an 80-year drinking career, still amounts to 34 pints per day. However great his appetites, I'm a bit skeptical of that number.

There must be an order of magnitude error there, possibly an extra zero in the printed number. The smoking of four tons looks feasible, for sixty years at about 180g/day (enough tobacco for 9 packs of cigarettes, but used in pipes ).

As an occasional pipe smoker, I can tell you that 180g/day is nigh-on impossible. A "bowl" (the unit you put in the pipe at once) is 1g - 1.5g, or roughly the same amount as in a single cigarette. So, that's 120 - 180 bowls per day. With an unfiltered pipe you would incinerate your tongue in a day smoking that much. Longer stems might help, but that is still a shitload of tobacco.

Re: The king of smokers

#56

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

HillaryBriss wrote: post #25

> [tobacco's] virtues rarely get a hearing, and yet the latter are many and great. To quiet nervous rest; to soothe a ruffled temper; to favour calm and partial thought; to steady and clear (not to cloud) a confused, overworked brain; to counteract the effects of physical exhaustion Taking this at face value, I wonder what impact such a drug could have on the productivity of a workforce, especially programmers. I als…

Note that the listed "virtues" are, in large part, descriptions of the relief of nervousness, irritability, and lack of focus resulting from nicotine cravings in nicotine addicts.

Addicts to many drugs experience similar relief when they consume the drug to which they are addicted.

Re: The king of smokers

#57

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #23

tptacek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty unlikely that cannabis smoking is significantly safer than tobacco smoking for lung health, and far more likely that the gap in outcomes in the literature is due to the difficulty (historically) of doing studies on the same scale as the tobacco studies. We seem too ready to forget that the cancer/tobacco link was itself once controversial.

I think this issue is muddied by conflating two different questions. 1. Tobacco itself is quite carcinogenic. Snuff, chew, gutka, and any other means of consumption all have strong cancer links. Cannabis, as I understand it, is not nearly as carcinogenic as that. 2. Smoking is also, separately , carcinogenic. Regularly breathing dense smoke is terrible for your lungs, even if you're smoking dried lettuce. I think it'…

I have heard (from cannabis advocates, so taking it with a very large halite deposit) that cannabis itself has anti-cancer, or at least anti-tumor, activity. If true, it may be that some of the chemicals present in cannabis may alleviate the harm from the carcinogenic chemicals present in all smoke from burnt vegetable matter. If the effect is large enough, cannabis may still have a net benefit, even when smoked. Maybe.

But really, no one should be inhaling the smoke from anything that's on fire. Nor even eating food seared at high temperatures or by open flames. Some of those Maillard, caramelization, pyrolysis, and carbonization reaction products (like acrolein, acrylamide, heterocyclic amines, and polycyclic aromatics) may contribute significantly to flavor, but they are also very bad for your body, and are similar, if not identical, to the chemicals produced in smoked plants.

So you don't even escape that risk with cannabis edibles, because as I understand it, the plant matter has to be heated above 100C in order to produce the desired recreational effects, and some (impatient) people accomplish that by grilling it in a skillet, destroying some of the potentially medicinal molecules and introducing carcinogenic ones. This is why you really need someone trained in proper lab technique to test the claims. No two amateur stoners will prepare identical cultivars of cannabis in exactly the same way. The cannabis researcher will isolate variables and devise a repeatable experiment.

It is unfortunate that we have little reliable evidence to confirm or deny the anti-carcinogenic cannabis hypothesis, just because of political interference with the science. Few reputable scientists want to touch the stuff, because the DEA makes it such a pain, and there is also the risk of persecution resulting from politically unpopular findings. It would be really, really embarrassing for the US federal government if anyone were actually able to prove that whole cannabis treatments (rather than just a single purified component, like Marinol) either reduce cancers directly or reduce the negative side effects from proven cancer treatments.

Re: The king of smokers

#58

Post by Someone » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

defen wrote: post #33

Does smoking (or smelling like smoke) keep mosquitoes away? I'm wondering if some second-order effect, like malaria prevention, led doctors back then to think that smoking was healthy.

In an age where soap and taking a bath were virtually unheard of, tobacco smoke must have smelled reasonably nice.

And of course, there's http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/ (2010):

"Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin, increase total lung capacity and stimulate weight loss, factors that all contribute to enhanced performance in endurance sports."

:-)

Re: The king of smokers

#59

Post by fallinghawks » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

defen wrote: post #33

Does smoking (or smelling like smoke) keep mosquitoes away? I'm wondering if some second-order effect, like malaria prevention, led doctors back then to think that smoking was healthy.

No, it doesn't. Back when I smoked I would blow smoke at them and they would just duck and find a different direction to attack.

Re: The king of smokers

#60

Post by mercer » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

ionised wrote: post #8

maxerickson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most of the people espousing that attitude acknowledge that the smoking part has negative consequences? Hence vaping and edibles and such?

I've witnessed countless pro-legalisation fundamentalists that absolutely refuse to believe smoking cannabis has any negative effect whatsoever, phsyically or mentally. As someone who smoked it heavily for around 10 years (don't anymore) I know it can have negative effects. I witnessed them in myself and in the people around me at the time. I'm pro-legalisation myself, but can't help roll my eyes at these 'potheads'…

I can confirm that. And on top of the negative effects that you mention, I was also definitely addicted to it. The physical withdrawal was relatively mild, of course (even though it was still quite unpleasant), but it took me a long time and quite a few relapses until I finally managed to quit. And I was never a daytime smoker even.

And I'm not the only one. I've lived with and been friends with quite a few long-term 'potheads'. Some, but not all of them, were also part of this 'weed culture'. I'd say at least half of them wanted to quit, tried to quit, but often didn't manage, for years on end.

Now, I think that's actually pretty decent all in all, considering 'my crowd', and it's nothing like what I've seen alcohol do! But it's still significant enough to be a little bit careful around pot. I'm all for legalization, but let's not pretend there are no risks!