The king of smokers
thomas-morris.uk
thomas-morris.uk
Sure, tobacco is pretty bad for you in general, but all of these things are pretty much true. Do people not believe that tobacco has positive psychoactive effects or something? Kinda weird to see this put in a sarcastic light.
Pipe smoking should be done slowly, methodically and with full consideration of what tobacco is. The last thing I need is turning something pleasurable and calming into an addition.
In the end, tobacco is probably bad, but so is the air in most major cities in the world. :P
How is "mental or neurological" not physical?
Don't you mean 'purported beneficial effects'? Damage to the lungs is most certainly an 'effect', albeit a negative one. The way you wrote it, it reads as if something like lung damage is all in one's head, imagined (and I'm sure that's not what you meant?).
While I don't condone smoking, Wikipedia[1] summarized certain physical benefits of nicotine from specific sources (and I cannot comment on the reputation of the sources themselves):
>Nicotine is frequently used for its performance-enhancing effects on cognition, alertness, and focus.[40] A meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[41]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Enhancing_performance
This is what struck me: of all the SSRIs she'd had ever tried, none had ever worked as well as tobacco. Tobacco moderated her depression and mood swings more effectively than any modern drug that her doctors had prescribed for her.
So I when I read this passage, what strikes me is how much truth there is still in this, even in the year 2016:
"its 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; "
> This is what struck me: of all the SSRIs she'd had ever tried, none had ever worked as well as tobacco. Tobacco moderated her depression and mood swings more effectively than any modern drug that her doctors had prescribed for her.
I'm not sure there is justification for the conclusion that the previous depression, and relatively severe symptoms on smoking cessation that, from your description, seem to be of a type that is known to be associated with nicotine withdrawal (though atypically severe) are indications that smoking was "treating" an underlying depression that morphed into something else when tobacco use stopped, rather than that the person involved had a past occurrence of depression and later had relatively severe nicotine withdrawal when they stopped smoking tobacco.
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.
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 ).
Taking this at face value, I wonder what impact such a drug could have on the productivity of a workforce, especially programmers.
I also wonder what has replaced it as the fraction of the smoking population declined over the last four or five decades.
That and electronic cigarettes.
A few years ago, I got a diagnosis of ADHD and medication was a recommendation. Generic amphetamine salts are what I use now, both an extended (20mg) and quick release dose (10mg). They made more of a difference in my focus than I ever thought. Only problem is that my mind turns into a bullet, I do whatever work I start on with little to no distraction but I can easy end up wasting time if I get sidetracked right as the medication kicks in. Nicotine still has its place for me, I use it everyday to keep awake and alert for my work. Medication is strictly for days where I know I have don't have time for distractions.
Coffee has a milder effect than the medication but it's a nice, quick boost in concentration and alertness that can get me through a class or meeting. I usually avoid drinking it on days I take medication as I tend to feel a very strained feeling, it's very unpleasant sensation and I become hyperactive and careless with my work. Nicotine and coffee have a complementary feel, they have different effects but they fit nicely together.
I think stimulants are my favorite thing ever. I wouldn't be anywhere close to where I am now in my career without their help. Most of my weaknesses come from procrastination now instead of both procrastination and being easily distracted. I'm getting better at starting things on time now and with the boost of focus, I don't take as long getting my work done than in the past.
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...
Addicts to many drugs experience similar relief when they consume the drug to which they are addicted.
But I was bitten countless times when I was a smoker, so it's not a very effective remedy.
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."
:-)
I don't think the nicotine in a drag is high enough to do much. From what I remember, much higher concentrations were or are used in ant killer.
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mosquitoes-find-yo...
NB: I think all drugs should be legalised so this isn't an anti-drugs post.
The other reason being the gradually mounting paranoia eventually culminating in what I can only describe as a paranoid anxiety attack.
The day that happened I quit.
I'm pro-legalisation but I abused it and ruined it for myself. Many others do too, all the while espousing its complete lack of drawbacks, which I find irritating.
That said, I personally don't feel comfortable indulging in something chronically that has such pronounced effect on my mental abilities. Even if it has no long-term physical consequences, the habit (and what comes with it: junk food, junk tv, lethargy, etc.) itself can't be ideal.
Perhaps it would work if I didn't have access to the internet and/or lived in a more nature-like area. Or perhaps it would work if my lifestyle was already different. I don't know. But as it is, if I smoke I become either couch-locked or jittery and paranoid.
I think individual differences matter a great deal, and you're right in pointing that out.
That said, the vast majority of regular pot smokers I know are more similar to me than they are to you, so based on that I think the negative bias is at least somewhat justified. I'd never tell someone not to smoke, I wouldn't judge chronic smokers no matter their lifestyle. But I've warned every one of my siblings and those curious about it to keep an eye out for how they respond to the stuff. It's nowhere near as potentially dangerous as alcohol, I think, but it's also not quite like picking up a coffee habit.
(I do have to confirm that I would occasionally get a burst of 'creativity' in particular when coding on purely-fun side-projects! Doing so was enjoyable and funny albeit not always very productive. I miss that sometimes.)
You should re-phrase this as: "the people I know who publicly advertise the fact that they smoke pot".
In my experience, there are a lot of marijuana users who are otherwise extremely normal people (and even sometimes on the exceptional end of normal). But given the legal status of marijuana, an ambitious middle-aged professional with a young family who also smokes a couple times a month is unlikely to publicly advertise the fact.
Because you (presumably) don't smoke, those people are extremely unlikely to confide in you about this particular subject.
A good counter example is someone I know who didn't start until around age 25, only indulges occasionally (so it isn't an addiction), and has very high cognitive ability (currently making 6 figures in the financial industry).
Cannabis has been a Schedule 1 drug for decades, which makes it, according to the DEA's own definition, a drug "with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."
It's only in the past couple of years that there's been any sort of serious talk about potential health benefits. Marijuana use and sale was first banned in 1937, and when that ban was later declared unconstitutional, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 created the drug scheduling system and placed it in the "most dangerous" category.
Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the original 1937 ban, so it seems hard to claim that the prevailing "Marijuana talk" of our time has focused on the health benefits, rather than the dangers. The reason there's been a small but constant discourse on the health benefits of cannabis over the past eight decades is that the current laws and the official DEA stance are clearly overzealous.
It's as if soft drinks were outlawed, and our government declared that they were as bad for your health as heroin. In truth, if you are a sufficiently heavy "daily drinker" of sugar water, you will develop a severe chemical dependence, and eventually wind up with type 2 diabetes, which will permanently damage your health and certainly shorten your lifespan. However, there's nothing wrong with having a root beer every now and then.
So if soft drinks had been illegal for the past 80 years because they had "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse" (which is true), you'd definitely be hearing some determined voices pointing out that there were some potential health benefits of sugar and water.
This is the number one stereotype of marijuana users, but I implore you to not lump all of us into that group. There exists a large portion of users that respect intelligence and try to lead interesting lives.
A big problem is that cannabis can make you feel totally OK with whatever you are currently doing, when otherwise you may feel bored and become motivated to do something else. Mix this with the fact that regular marijuana use probably won't destroy your life (it's simply not a hard drug), and you get people that float through existence feeling fine but then one day realize years have gone by and they forgot to develop unique skills or an interesting personality.
However, many people figure this out before it's too late and make sure that getting high goes hand-in-hand with doing something interesting. i.e. smoke and then create art, music, or software. For the people who don't realize this, well... the cold truth is that many people aren't smart or talented to begin with and maybe need some alleviation from the more painful aspects of the human condition. I believe weed is a better solution for this than hard drugs, Rx pills, or everyone's favorite toxin: alcohol.
Last of all I want to say that smoke is clearly carcinogenic, but there have been recent studies suggesting things that people would have thought crazy only 10-20 years ago:
http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/cannabis...
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' that give the case for legalisation a bad name.
I don't argue this claim—I don't have any evidence either way—but nor do I regard it as self-evident. An honest, not rhetorical or leading, question: why should inhaling smoke be bad when inhaling, say, ordinary air isn't? Is it the heat? Particulates?
EDIT: Thanks for the excellent responses! (The detailed discussions below are far more interesting than my question, I think.) To be clear (since I am "submitting too fast" to reply to comments below), lest I sound like some kind of denier, when I say "I don't have any evidence either way", I mean literally that—just that I haven't bothered to get any, not that there isn't any.
"Ordinary air" is bad for your lungs when it's full of dust, soot, or other particulates. Smog is bad for you. So is smoke. So is pretty much anything else you might breath that includes particulates. Your lungs can handle it in small amounts but it's never good for them and long term exposure can be really bad for them.
The heat probably isn't great for your lungs either. But I doubt it's a significant factor.
Sam Harris had a decent presentation about it here: https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion
EDIT: This is just wood smoke I guess - You are asking about generic "smoke". I apologize for not addressing your question fully.
To the contrary, this is my favourite response (even though I don't have the religious response in defence of wood smoke that Sam Harris hopes to provoke). Thanks!
You haven't seen evidence that smoke inhalation is a hazard with both acute and long-term harms?
Try this: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22smoke+inhalation%22+p...
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/China-Ai...
From this, various writers have attempted to make some extrapolations along the lines of "one day in Beijing is equivalent to smoking X cigarettes", where X ranges from 1/6 to 40. There are compelling arguments for both 1/6 and 40, despite those numbers seeming so different. Generally, the 1/6 figure comes from measuring the exact volume of dangerous substances inhaled, and the 40 figure comes from the premise that air pollution is significantly more damaging than tar from cigarettes and thus it takes much less of it to have the same effect as tar from 40 cigarettes. Regardless, the bottom line is that sometimes even ordinary air is not good for you.
Anyway, your observation that air in Beijing, etc., is polluted from smoke works towards my point, not against it.
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!
We seem too ready to forget that the cancer/tobacco link was itself once controversial.
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's pretty well established that via 2, smoking cannabis is bad for you. If it's less bad than tobacco, that's as likely to be usage habits as anything. But people are still arguing fairly extensively over 1 - tobacco is a known carcinogen no matter how you ingest it, but I'm not sure that's a settled question for cannabis.
If by "usage habits" you mean "usual quantities of material smoked and inhaled", then, sure, that's probably a pretty big difference. Now, legality (and, price, which is strongly influenced by legality) plays some role in that, but the inherent nature of the effects of each drug and their concentrations in the material that is smoked also play a pretty big role.
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.
Cannabis has been shown to have anti-cancer properties in at least two clinical studies that I know of. Not the miracle cure that some cannabis advocates say it is, but certainly worth researching.
The fact that cannabis reduces side effects of cancer treatments is well known and a major reason why it is prescribed in the US.
It's absolutely ridiculous that the DEA continues to insist that it's not a medicine, it's clearly a medicine.
Because most studies showed that tobacco didn't cause cancer up until cigarettes were invented. And even to this day it's still not really clear to what extent tobacco itself causes cancer.
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 that's a huge amount of weed for an average person. Even out of folks who are getting high every day, almost none are hitting that mark-- the most obvious proof of that being that it would cost them hundreds or thousands of dollars per day. Even if we allow for unfiltered cannabis smoke to be several times more carcinogenic than commercial cigarette smoke, we're not going to get there.
In fact the opposite is true; the average person who develops a serious weed habit (more than a few grams a week) is actively incentivized to try safe methods of consumption like vaporization, extracts, or edibles, if nothing else because they will save a lot of money.
So apples-to-apples, we wind up comparing the habits of generic cigarette smokers to those of drug dealers and very wealthy, very pot-addicted people. I understand the desire not to approve of any amount of smoke inhalation, but the null hypothesis here is not equivalent risk.
Apart from all of that, our generation didn't invent smoking weed, and neither did our parents. If cannabis represents a public health hazard on a similar scale to cigarette smoking, it's hiding pretty well after all this time.
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.
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).
Nicotine is a nootropic
no signs that it causes cancer
Its a hard connection to prove, but all smoke contains chemicals that are known to cause cancer. Eaten cannabis probably isn't carcinogenic, but smoked probably is. Few cannabis smokers inhale nearly as much smoke as tobacco smokers. Also, tobacco is a nightshade and toxic if eaten, so maybe that has something to with it being more damaging when smoked.
There is some evidence that THC has some anti-cancerous properties that could make this different. There is also a lung specialist (Taskin) who researched it and it went against his original hypothesis.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23802821
One thing to note, is that people tend to smoke a lot less cannabis than they do tobacco.
More research needs to be done and hopefully it will be coming soon.
> I also find it surprising to see how it is sometimes depicted very positively in mainstream TV series.
Why? Most peoples experiences with marijuana are positive. That doesn't mean it's harmless, but not every show on television has to be part of some drug-prevention propaganda.
Read that and my immediate thought was "Huh, I've heard this argument before."