61–70 of 267 posts
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We socialized people to realize smoking is dirty, then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes are filling their lungs with tar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellne... . At least cigarettes made people skinny and hot.
Curious, what makes having cigarettes have low body fat? or in general they get undernourished?
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But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my…
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Nicotine addiction is chronic and very hard to break. You can reset caffeine tolerance and dependence in 10 days.
Actually with vaping it becomes pretty easy to quit. You just taper down the nicotine slowly until you're on nothing and eventually you just kind of stop because you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trade between North America and Europe really became a thing) and these guys pulled this thumb drive that tastes like cotton candy out of nowhere and every young person is just jonesing . And the regulatory/public opinion environment isn't what it was in the 80s a…
Opium War 2.0 - we have too much inertia to stop the "good times", and while everyone had the right to ruin their bodies, they're doing it out of complete ignorance. The Western relationship to addictive substances is insane, and I hate to admit this, but to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right.
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But the freedom to kill oneself! /s
Not sure why you got downvoted with /s tag. Is it really freedom of a drug hacks into your brain biology to make you desire something over and over again?
So, I also support "deny by default" policies for addictive substances. The problem is "deny by default" has a side effect of creating unregulated black markets. So it's a really hard problem, at least from my perspective.
I don't think about the downvote. The comment might be considered as shallow, or some people might really want the freedom, I don't know, and frankly, I don't care.
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You say it like that it is desirable. Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine, so the effect for society as a whole is non negligible if a huge mass of people get a slight performance bounce. Smoking is annoying, disgusting, unhealthy etc. but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster.
> Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine. This is the first time I've ever heard someone bring this argument. Ignoring the health risks involved with nicotine, the 'performance boost' is negligible. It's less than caffeine. > but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster. There are nicotine gums and patches available, and a very good…
In certain parts of society that is what happens, including fun places like the European Parliament.
If you were to test YC applicants for Adderall (illicit or otherwise) I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were over half of them, and if you would be surprised you're naive.
I'm sure there are negative impacts of vaping and it should definitely be more heavily regulated. But the neutering of Juul only to allow dozens of Chinese clones to take their place was such a huge blunder.
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Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my…
I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful . 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"
A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
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Opium War 2.0 - we have too much inertia to stop the "good times", and while everyone had the right to ruin their bodies, they're doing it out of complete ignorance. The Western relationship to addictive substances is insane, and I hate to admit this, but to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right.
Which non-Western utopias have avoided addictive substances? List them.
The kind of model Canada and California follows could be helpful as well, if only prosecution and the stick was also used in conjunction with cracking down on black markets for drugs the same way provinces and CA do on moonshine.
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We socialized people to realize smoking is dirty, then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes are filling their lungs with tar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellne... . At least cigarettes made people skinny and hot.
Curious, what makes having cigarettes have low body fat? or in general they get undernourished?