“Cigarette smoking causes about one of every five deaths in the US each year.”
cdc.gov
cdc.gov
Like it or not, smoking is enjoyable.
I would like to say something encouraging, but can't think of anything fitting given the relative anonymity of this conversation.
> she would smoke around me despite it causing me and my sister to have asthma attacks
For me it was mostly my father. There was a time when everyone in my family (except me) smoked, but my siblings and my mother quit before or around the time when I got asthma. My father hung onto it for another 15 years. Then during a checkup, his doctor theorized that he may have lung cancer. The tests came back negative, but just visualizing this fate vividly caused my father to quit smoking from one day to the next.
What's the externality society bears for the individual's pleasure?
Figure that out, and assign tobacco taxes accordingly.
Unfortunately, the statistics are often muddied by externalised costs being assumed to include ~50k/year of lost life per smoker along with 'lost future income taxes'.
Generally smokers die earlier and more quickly. Ironically, living a very long life might actually cost society more due to many more years of intensive healthcare costs at the end of a long life.
I once heard an actuary claim that the tobacco taxes paid by smokers in NZ, if used for private health insurance for the individual, would afford the absolute best health cover available with funds to spare.
I apologise for not citing sources for the above claims. Quite frankly I am lazy and it would take some time (I have spent hours researching this in the past). You'll just have to take this as opinion.
Even if we could assign a strict dollar amount to the long term cost of a pack of cigarettes I don't think that would be a useful thing to do. The cost to society does not factor in the cost to the consumer and while I'm normally pretty libertarian about such things we're talking about a very addictive drug here.
Perhaps also explore legalizing marajuana (I think weed should be legal any way but I wonder what effects it would have on tobacco use. I wonder how that body handles a nicotine craving and then ingests marajuana instead.)
I understand the personal freedom and liberty arguements and I don't think we should jump straight to outlawing it(don't want organized crime taking up cigarette production). However, in the end cigarette's are addictive poison that tobacco companies sell to our people for profit. I won't feel bad if they are crushed by taxes and regulation.
Edit: Also, maybe, something with vaping. Maybe...
This is pretty much one of the main reasons for my tobacco habit. Cannabis is hard to come by where I'm at (not the US), nobody smokes pure because most people don't have reliable enough supply, the supply shortages also make it quite expensive.
That's why lacing the weed with tobacco is very widespread, which leads to the odd situation that most people who want to try weed end up being addicted to tobacco.
Because of those additives, tobacco+cannabis is way easier to smoke, resulting in people keeping hits in longer, which supposedly gives stronger effects but also more time for the tar to settle down in the lungs.
In that regard, it's odd how people keep on harping on about cannabis being "so much stronger than it used to be", while the tobacco industry literally spend decades and billions of $ to make their tobacco more potent, easier to smoke and as addictive as possible, by adding dozens of questionable chemicals.
At this point tobacco is probably one of the most overdesigned drugs in human history, I can't think of any other psychoactive substance that has had so much time, money and effort put into it.
It's not about our rights, it's about public health. Cigarrettes should be illegal, and all the companies making these products shluld be banned. This is costing the entire world millions every month.
I am a smoker. I smoke about a pack everyday. And I've tried quitting more than once, but this thing is more addictive than a lot of substances you can buy on the street. The only reason it's legal is because some people get huge profits from it. If they asked me, I would ban it in a second. In the US there's people in jail for selling a joint in the street, but nobody has done anything to put the people owning the companies who manufacture shit that kills so many people everyday behind bars. I don't get it. I mean, I do, but it just shows how nasty some parts of every goverment are
No. Nicotine is a carcinogen. Forgive my surprise, but I'm absolutely blown away that this isn't common knowledge in 2017.
Edit: I appreciate the distinction that folks are making as far as what constitutes a carcinogen. Yes, the science we have today falls short of us classifying nicotine as a 'complete carcinogen'. If that makes you sleep better, then ok, but the science shows carcinogenicity in vitro, and substantial ability to promote tumor growth, metastasis, and recurrence in vivo [0][1][2][3].
Your friend is also potentially exposing himself and those around him to formaldehyde and diacetyl and so on, which is present in many e-cigarette liquids.
Folks: eat healthy, get a bit of exercise, read good books, and most of all, develop relationships with people you truly trust. If you find yourself needing to rely on smoking or drinking to get you through the week, take a step back and garbage-collect your life and decide if you're living the life you want, or if it's a life that's in need of radical restructuring.
[0] doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007524
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7848904
[2] http://www.mdedge.com/ccjm/article/101393/adolescent-medicin...
[3] doi:10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-14-0681
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine says:
> Although there is insufficient evidence to classify nicotine as a carcinogen
I guess you better fix Wikipedia...
in addition to what i posted above, this paper is a good summary of what we know at this point: doi:10.1038/nrc3725
(36MB pdf) Page 113 https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...
> Cancer
> Nicotine is a highly bioactive compound with effects ranging from being a natural pesticide in tobacco leaves to causing addiction in tobacco users. For cancer, there is some biological basis for proposing that nicotine may promote cancer based on experimental studies that have limitations in replicating human exposure and on mechanistic studies, but human evidence is lacking (Lee et al. 2005, 2012; Dasgupta and Chellappan 2006; Zheng et al. 2007; Catassi et al. 2008; Chen et al. 2008b, 2010; Egleton et al. 2008).
(It's a couple of pages, too long to paste here. But all the people posting wikipedia links might also want to read it.)
You do yourself a disservice by so stridently and repeatedly claiming "Nicotine is a carcinogen." There are plenty of compounds we're exposed to through tobacco use that are uncontroversially carcinogenic that you could point to instead (if you feel the need to name them explicitly), as well as a lot of other nastiness like formaldehyde as you point out above. Dwelling and defending this weaker position makes it easier for uncharitable readers to dismiss you.
> Although there is insufficient evidence to classify nicotine as a carcinogen, there is an ongoing debate about whether it functions as a tumor promoter. In vitro studies have associated it with cancer, but carcinogenicity has not been demonstrated in vivo. There is inadequate research to demonstrate that nicotine is associated with cancer in humans, but there is evidence indicating possible oral, esophageal, or pancreatic cancer risks. Nicotine in the form of nicotine replacement products is less of a cancer risk than smoking. Nicotine replacement products have not been shown to be associated with cancer in the real world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Cancer
The fact that it's other compounds that are carcinogenic rather than nicotine in no way changes the effects of second-hand smoke.
Hate to be a skeptic -- or realist -- (and also risk downvotes) but here goes.
No matter what we try to do, it's looks like an Un-winnable battle. Unless Tobacco is outlawed, it's almost impossible to fight the entity known as "Big Tobacco".
They have an army of lobbyists, congressmen, senators, and all other power decision makers in their pockets, and using a combination of the above people, they get BILLS signed into LAW that legalizes a lot of things that would be otherwise be CRIMINAL, and on top of that, have very shady, but highly effecting marketing schemes and PR that they perform, to target the crowd most susceptible to succumbing to tobacco - teenagers, young adults, and (young) military men.
> AND THEN CAME THE CHRISTMAS CARDS.
> Big Tobacco sponsored, organized, and paid for thousands of service members to receive tapes with video recordings of their families back home sending sweet messages for the holidays. Seems like a super f*king nice gesture, right? Until you hear what Big Tobacco sited as their motivation for the program. “Positive publicity and goodwill associated with Marlboro,” and “awareness and visibility of Marlboro among young adult smokers.”
> Today, 38% of US military smokers start after enlisting.
Source: https://www.thetruth.com/articles/videos/exploitation-milita...
Its not just smoke wafting in from neighbors, but also the third hand smoke deposited in the unit you may be exposed to by previous smokers.
For example, its almost impossible to remove the third hand smoke from ventilation systems that use flexible duct tubing because they tear.
The cost of a total clean-up is so high, I bet nobody actually does it correctly. Since there is no transparency in this matter, as a consumer you can't make an educated decision on the unit you area about to rent.
Also, article title is "Tobacco-Related Mortality"
(Technically, it's true that the term "cigarette smoking" is too narrow. When my mother asked my father to quit cigarette smoking, he happily obliged and started stuffing a tobacco pipe instead.)
I'm only pointing out the actual article title. HN guidelines are to use the actual article title (with some caveats). As that's not the case here, I think it's useful to provide it.
Since you asked, as for other tobacco-related activities, tobacco is consumed in a number of different ways, smoked or otherwise. One of the bullets at the top of the article explicitly mentions:
> Smokeless tobacco is a known cause of cancer.
Wikipedia lists:
> Dried tobacco leaves are mainly used for smoking in cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and flavored shisha tobacco. They can be also be consumed as snuff, chewing tobacco, dipping tobacco and snus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco
Vaping is also an alternative which I suppose one could consider distinct from smoking.
Edit: actually there's a full Wikipedia article on smokeless tobacco - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_tobacco