http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/harm-reduc...
"Why have Swedes stopped smoking? Because Sweden has adopted a harm-reduction strategy: it has largely replaced deadly cigarettes with a product that supplies users with both nicotine and tobacco yet doesn’t increase the odds of dying the way smoking does. That product is called "snus" (rhymes with goose).
A modern iteration of snuff, snus are little pouches of moist tobacco placed under the upper lip. Scandinavians have been ingesting nicotine via smokeless tobacco since the early 18th century, a habit that changed only during the Second World War, when cigarettes became popular. Smoking peaked in 1980 in Sweden at 34 per cent of the population. Since then, the growing awareness of the dangers of smoking has brought about a steady, year-over-year reduction in the smoking rate, just as it has in much of the western world."
This also describes how a lot of people are poor.
This thinking also reeks of the 'just world fallacy', in which the predicament of the poor is deemed to be a deserved consequence of their moral failings.
You should expand your horizons.
> This also describes how a lot of people are poor.
I suppose we should be cheered by your qualification "a lot of," since it seems to indicate that you at least have to acknowledge your growing awareness that some, if not the majority nor vast majority, of the poor are there for structural reasons, rather than shortsightedness.
What of those who are there for reasons other than shortsightedness? What of those for whom shortsightedness is a result of mental health issues? What of those who can see ahead, but see no bright future and are making rational choices in the face of that?
Fortunately, having qualified your remarks in the way you have, you have opened yourself up to a responsibility to think critically about those whom you have dismissed. I wish you the best in that.
I don't think I dismissed anyone. People make bad decisions on things they are in control of and it makes them more poor. The rich have more self control -- maybe not. Those with good self control tend to be better off -- definitely.
I'm all for the argument that smoking is a rational choice for someone without a lot of money. There is also the compelling argument that poor impulse control, being poor and smoking have a strong correlation. Maybe even as a common cause for poverty and smoking.
Having watched friends spend entire paychecks drinking, smoking, having unprotected sex (with the inevitable consequences), buying new camaros at blistering interest rates, fleetingly fashionable clothes -- I somehow think that my choice to eat mountains of rice and beans and live with roommates somehow had something to do with my relative success.
Sure, you can tell some people it's not their fault, but absolving everyone of responsibility for their choices is not helping them at all.
For an incredible overview of the benefits and harms of nicotine, see Gwen: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
Never got into smoking tobacco or weed, both just made me feel bad.
I guess it's one of those things that's so obvious no one actually says it. If you think about it, that benefit is never mentioned in debates about smoking and the appropriate government response. I know because I aggressively scour for such upsides, being the "hipster contrarian". Had I known about the pleasure and stimulation of smoking[3], you can bet I would bring it up every time!
Reminds me of "What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?" [2]
Now you might ask, "Did it never seem strange to you that people would suck this disgusting tar into their lungs if it didn't at least feel good or something?"
Well, no. IME, people indulge in a lot of BS without obvious explanation. For example, people claim to like the taste of alcohol[ic drinks], and that is outright ridiculous -- or so I thought, but it was another case of [2]. Also, modern art.
My model of smokers was roughly that, they start doing it to look cool, and then get hooked, so that they have to smoke to fend off the pain of withdrawal. I didn't think the act could feel good itself!
Now that I think about it, people don't mention the good feeling of other drugs in debates about them either. For alcohol, I had a good explanation: those benefits are taboo, and people use the purported taste and refinement of their "fave bev" as "intellectual covering fire" for what they really want, the alcohol high.
In conclusion, the phenomenon in [2] is serious business!
[1] See, for example, the responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14569775
[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...
[3] Incidentally, I read Bostrom's Superintelligence, where he mentions writing the book while being powered by caffeine and nicotine, but I wrote that off (like most purported benefits of smoking) as psychosomatic.