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Comment by bobby_9x | Hacker News Reader

Who do people still smoke? It's been know to cause cancer for 50+ years and is expensive. It's not like the education isn't there (I've seen anti-smoking ads on TV for the past 10 years and at the theater before seeing a movie).

Just like alcohol, it seems to be people that willingly want to be taxed.

I don't see it as a problem.

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Because it makes them happy.

Tobacco activates the pleasure centres of the brain. Just like food, sex, drinking, or some illegal drugs. So you get a "reward" each time you partake, with smoking being particularly rewarding.

A lot of poor people are trying to "treat" underlying unhappiness or stress, sometimes without knowing it (sometimes fully aware). It isn't a lack of understanding about the health risks, it is both an addiction, and the "least bad" alternative for what they're trying to accomplish (improve happiness, treat depression, decrease stress, etc).

It may surprise the smug but there are a lot of very intelligent people who have addictions (e.g. drinking, drugs, eating, smoking, etc), including doctors, PhD holders, and award winning theorists. You're seriously misguided if you think it is because they lack information/health warnings.

I've sat in a dive bar and listened to smokers voices ramble incoherently about the cancer conspiracy. Someone doing that might understand the warnings, but they have rejected them and aren't weighing them against smoking.

Clearly anecdotal as I've heard the complete opposite. Those who smoke are well aware of most/all of the effects.

Yeah, my intent was to convey the anecdote, not to draw a generalization.

Also, I wasn't saying they lacked awareness of the medical claims about the harms of smoking, I was saying, in my estimation, that they were not weighing that information when they picked up a cigarette (because they were drunkenly rambling about the suppression of cancer cures...).

> Why do people still smoke?

They're addicted.

Wrong question... Why do people continue to start smoking?

I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, where we were bombarded with anti-smoking ads, the health effects were well known, and the prices were high.

It blows my mind that I have peers who smoke. They would have seen the same ads, had the same facts available, and mostly come from similar backgrounds (middle-class).

I started in high school because of peer pressure. I've since quit, but I think that the majority of people that start only do so because their friends do.

Plus, smoking a cigarette feels really good. Once you're addicted, they don't, but until then they just feel really nice.

Wanting to be like your friends can cause someone to start smoking, but it can also be neighbors, parents, coworkers, or just people on TV.

Behaviors are "contagious" that way. Gun violence and suicide have been shown to be "transferrable".

Self-Medication.

Nicotine is a stimulant that elevates the mood almost like magic.

The numbers are particularly telling if you look at schizophrenia sufferers. People with schizophrenia are about 2.5 time more likely to smoke than people without.

> where we were bombarded with anti-smoking ads

You've answered your own question: rebellion.

That was the main reason I was sneaking cigs in the alley after school.

True. And maybe more generally, there can't be pro or anti ads (same with good or bad ads).

Just ads, ads and ads. That generates a tobacco culture with smokers and non-smokers, but both just saw ads.

A ton of factors, but there is some reason for hope. The smoking rate among US adults has been dropping at about 0.5% per year more-or-less consistently for decades, and is currently well under 20%! The ads, regulations, and outreach you're talking about are working, but major societal change is slow. Remember, in the 50s, the smoking rate was nearly 50%! Dropping that rate by half in less than one lifespan is pretty good, I think.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762370.html

Because addiction has very little to do with the substance itself, and it is mostly a coping mechanism to deal with many of the issues people of all social strata can face: traumas, broken homes, lack of self-realization, isolation, etc...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Or in comic form:

- http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park

Have you met people? Can you name a topic where ad campaigns and available facts have been 100% persuasive? It just doesn't work like that. For one thing, people are bad at assessing abstract risks--they figure it won't happen to them, or something else will get them first. Especially since most smokers start young, at a time when they're _especially_ bad at making these kinds of decisions (and the tobacco industry counts on that).

Have you ever done something that's bad for your health in the long term because it feels good /now/? Like, I dunno, eating fast food, drinking soda, drinking alcohol? Stayed up too late browsing the Internet?

While most of these are far less severe than smoking (perhaps obesity, drinking give it a run for its money), all of them are bad for our health in the long term and we know it, but we do it anyway. There's plenty of information out there to know about it, it's not like people don't know alcohol or burger king is bad for you. So why do people do it?

When you answer that question you'll have the answer to your question.

A lot of especially young people just plain do not care what happens to them when they are 70.

"I started smoking when I was a kid, like when I was ... like 14 and I thought, "I'll look really cool if I start smoking." Because I didn't get along with anybody. So, I started smoking, and wouldn't you know it? I did look cool! All of the sudden, all these broads liked me and everything. Not broads, but ladies, girls, whatever."

-- Norm Macdonald

Story time! I smoked my first cigarette when I was 20. I was living in chicago, and at the time I was homeless and had spent about an hour and a half sitting on one of the train stops contemplating jumping in front of one. Obviously, I was looking a bit distraught, and a woman came up to me to ask if I was alright. I said I was fine, and she offered me a cigarette. I figured at this point, who cares. I was literally about 10 feet and an impulse away from killing myself, so I accepted. I was able to resist that particular impulse, but the anxiety and depression have more or less followed me. I continued smoking, and my daily use has varied, and even ceasing periodically for months at a time. But I find myself turning back to smoking at times when I am so anxious and depressed that I really want to die. It helps me to calm a little, and placate the suicidal impulse long enough to pass.

> Why do people continue to start smoking?

Because tobacco smells and tastes nice (cigarettes mostly don't, but cigarettes are to the tobacco world as McDonald's is to the hamburger world). It stems the appetite and heightens the mind.

Why don't more people start to smoke?

I would imagine that the sheer propagandistic nature of the ads themselves would backfire in cases.

Really? I smoked a couple packs of cigarettes in my life and had no problem quitting. In my opinion cigarette addiction is blown out of proportion.

Addiction isn't that predictable. Lots of people can drink regularly and stop when they want to, lots of people can do cocaine a few times and not get addicted. That doesn't mean alcoholism and cocaine addiction don't exist.

You're right! Now that we have one single data point, we can make a generalization about cigarette addiction as a whole! And now we can just forget about the many decades of research ACS and other organizations have done tracking millions of smokers around the world, because you are the only data point we need!!

Same for me, but don't generalize - some people get easily addicted, some don't.

By that logic I can say because I've been drunk a number of times in my life but are in control of the substance, I think alcoholism is blown out of proportion.

I had an operation where I was given intravenous morphine once. When I got out of the hospital I wasn't jonesing for opiates. I think opiate addiction is just blown out of proportion.

Building tolerance and addiction is highly dependant on the individual, and so is quitting. Besides there's a difference between "a couple packs" and a long term smoking (at which point you're not yet that much addicted but smoke due to different reasons and get addicted in the meantime).

You smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes and quit. Are you implying that because you had such an easy time quitting, everyone else should too? That would be anecdotal, don't you think?

Coming from someone who used to smoke 2 packs a day, the addiction wasn't from the cigarettes themselves. It was from the life I had. I was depressed, had a dead end job, a shit relationship, family problems, etc. I tried to quit a number of times, but had many difficulties due to the fact that everything around me was constantly on fire.

I finally quit when things picked up. It was still a challenge going from around 40 cigarettes a day to none (cold turkey), and I ended up saying some things I definitely shouldn't have in the process, but I did it.

It's a similar story for many smokers. Also, if anything, it was blown out of proportion in the 90's. Things seem to have calmed down since then.

Yup and alcoholism isn't real because some people have a glass of wine with dinner.

I smoke on weekends, and only if I'm having a drink.

That's not addiction, that's just me enjoying a smoke.

No, because cigarettes are probably the single greatest pure consumption consumer good ever invented.

The addiction part lasts weeks; the behavior modification part is for the rest of your life.

Life is not a calculus problem...

On some level people start smoking because it's dangerous and bad for your health. They want to signal to others that they have a risk-taking personality, rebel against their parents, etc.

That's true of some people, but not everyone. People also become addicted to exercise, gambling, sex, and lots of other things, but it's not because those things make them look dangerous. It's because those things create a pleasure response in the brain.

Even when smoking wasn't considered dangerous at all, people willingly started doing it. The danger factor is more recent (the last 80 years or so).

Some tobacco smells or tastes really good when smoked.

It's pleasurable.

It's tasty.

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