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On Smoking

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Re: On Smoking

#341

Post by JohnWhigham »

warent wrote: post #107
mavhc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people start smoking? Surely they know it's addictive, expensive, and bad for you

I started because I thought it made me look really cool. Plus menthols tasted great

I don't think this is expounded enough: smoking does make you look cool. Hollywood inculcated society with this back in the 50s with the James Dean types. You go down to drags with bars and you see all the people outside doing it. There's something alluring about someone not caring that they're shaving off a fraction of a fraction of of their lifespan. To me socially I've found myself drawn to those who smoke vs. those that don't. They're right below the surface to where I can quickly find something in common with them. At one of my previous places, the CTO told me how he took a bunch of the employees from another job to start their own successful company. How did that happen? They got the idea because they were all smokers and all congregated at the same.

Re: On Smoking

#342

Post by ejolto »

defaultname wrote: post #338
strken wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely ridiculous claim given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second. Business Insider claims 76% of the population have smoked and 24% have become addicted, while 92% have consumed alcohol and 14% have become addicted[0]. That's nowhere near "almost everyone", it's 31%, and 15% for alcohol. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/most-addictive-substances...

"given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second" Okay, now exclude people who did that as children , an experience after which they had zero access to cigarettes. That same survey if demanding an adult experience would be much, much closer. Everyone has a "Jimmy lit up a smoke and I took a drag and coughed my guts out when I was 9" story. Overwhelmingly people either had a pro…

I've smoked tobacco on somewhere between 5 and 15 occasions over a decade since becoming an adult, but I didn't become a daily smoker or addicted to smoking. Am I just an extreme outlier?

Re: On Smoking

#343

Post by mikro2nd »

Jhsto wrote: post #7

Has anyone else tried writing under some arbitrary restrictions? In case you did not notice, the blog subtitle is 11 sentence essays. The post as well, unsurprisingly, is 11 sentences (... I guess, but it has a number of complicated ones).

The blog theme is 11-sentence essays, but then the author makes use of a semicolon where, tbh, I'd just have split the sentence. But that would have spoiled the structure/restriction, wouldn't it? Style thing, sure, but I'm with Vonnegut on the topic of semicolons...

Re: On Smoking

#344

Post by blueflow »

ejolto wrote: post #342
defaultname wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second" Okay, now exclude people who did that as children , an experience after which they had zero access to cigarettes. That same survey if demanding an adult experience would be much, much closer. Everyone has a "Jimmy lit up a smoke and I took a drag and coughed my guts out when I was 9" story. Overwhelmingly people either had a pro…

I've smoked tobacco on somewhere between 5 and 15 occasions over a decade since becoming an adult, but I didn't become a daily smoker or addicted to smoking. Am I just an extreme outlier?

Another data point:

I'm some kind of introvert, if i hang out with people, my social "battery" drains and i get tired. I smoke because it gives me much more time before my social "battery" is empty. I don't smoke otherwise.

Right now i'm at two packs a year.

Re: On Smoking

#345

Post by Renaud »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #310

Some fun facts about the ingredients in tobacco.. The reason smoking causes cancer is the high amount of polonium 210, yes, that stuff they used to kill Litvenchenko. The reason for the presence of polonium 210 is flavour. Truly. It sounds far fetched, but, while the polonium is thought to contaminate the plant from the environment. Tobacco plants have lots of sticky little hairs which attract particles. It could be…

I didn't know about this and was sceptical but it appears to be right and the CDC[1] mentions it, along with lead-210 being a source of radioactive accumulation in the lungs.

Apparently an information that cigarette manufacturers tried pretty hard to hide[2]...

[1]:https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/smoking.htm [2]:https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-pol...

Re: On Smoking

#346

Post by fnord77 »

amatic wrote: post #250
fnord77 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is quite possible that nicotine is a carcinogen itself and there is no safe form

I've read the opposite from gwern - that nicotine is safe, and the carcinogens are mostly in the burning of tobacco products. He tested nicotine as a nootropic, apparently has significant effect.

from wikipedia

> Nicotine can form carcinogenic Tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs) through a nitrosation reaction. ... However, nicotine in the mouth and stomach can react to form N-Nitrosonornicotine,[104] a known type 1 carcinogen,[105] suggesting that consumption of non-tobacco forms of nicotine may still play a role in carcinogenesis.

Re: On Smoking

#347

Post by malkosta »

I guess I'm the only person in the world who smoked for 15 years, and stopped on a beautiful day, without suffering. I still smoke very occasionally, socially, once a month maybe, but I definitely stopped having daily cravings to smoke alone days after I stopped.

Re: On Smoking

#348

Post by Sander_Marechal »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #30
murat131 wrote: post #3

The thing about smoking is that when you quit smoking you quit it every day. Imagine a light switch on the wall. You turn it off by quitting smoking and you can always go back at a desperate time for instance and turn it on. And some time later off again. Smoking your first cigarette implants that light switch on your mind and you can't make it go away. Since you know how it makes you feel good when the switch is on,…

Anecdata but that’s not how it worked for me. I was “20 a day” (which means 30 a day but that wasn’t socially acceptable to admit) for 4 years, 3.5 of which were spent trying to give up. The only 3 days i didn’t smoke in that time were when i had a horribly bad septic throat due to some infection and physically couldn’t smoke. Patches, lozenges, gums, the little ball tablet things, herbal cigs, e-cig - not the curren…

Exactly the same for me. I had the book for years and occasionally read a bit in it. At one point I finished it, tried to quit, failed, re-read it in one go and quit again. First day I failed and smoked a cigarette in the afternoon. The day after I quit again and it stuck. It's like a switch flipped in my head. I knew I'd never smoke again.

I tell people that quitting is simultaniously the easiest and the hardest thing I have ever done. I haven't had any urge to start smoking again. I've been drunk since, had very stressful times, etc. But I've never felt in danger of slipping back into the habit. 5 years now :-)

Re: On Smoking

#349

Post by Link512 »

I started smoking at 13 and quit at 22 cold turkey. 8 years later, I still sometimes dream at night about lighting a cigarette and it feels ecstatic when I do. Then I wake up and spend the entire day craving a smoke. The hook runs deep.

Re: On Smoking

#350

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

malkosta wrote: post #347

I guess I'm the only person in the world who smoked for 15 years, and stopped on a beautiful day, without suffering. I still smoke very occasionally, socially, once a month maybe, but I definitely stopped having daily cravings to smoke alone days after I stopped.

Not quite the same, but I smoked every time I drank for two years, and then just stopped for no reason. Never had a craving, I just "felt like" having a smoke for two years, and then didn't anymore.

This was during the time when you could go to a bar or club in Florida, show some person with a giant bag your ID, and receive two packs of cigarettes, free. I did this multiple times a week, so I always had a huge stack of free cigarettes and bar matches. That was also how I learned you could make friends by always having either a free cigarette or a lighter.

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