From the intrusion on others (second hand smoke) to the cancer, to the litter, there is absolutely nothing positive about cigarettes. I'm no fan of vaping, but as an intermediate step to the elimination of smoking, it is a necessary evil.
I would be very happy if cigarettes vanished from the world.
This is a silly statement. People smoke for many legitimate reasons beyond having an active addiction.
If they're medicated the hydrocarbons in burnt tobacco interact with antipsychotic medication, making it less effective, meaning they need more meds. And antipsychotic meds can be pretty nasty.
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg178
> In March 2014, a correction was made to the wording of recommendation 1.1.3.3 to clarify that it is the hydrocarbons in cigarette smoke that cause interactions with other drugs, rather than nicotine.
What people with psychosis need is early intervention that addresses the full range of bio-psycho-social needs the person has.
Is this a significant reason relative to suicide amongst psychotics?
In England about 4,500 deaths by suicide per year. There are about 55million people in the UK, and about 1% of them have psychosis, so there are roughly 550000 people with psychosis.
The deaths by suicide, while both tragic and preventable, don't change the average lifespan much.
It's the heart attacks and strokes and diabetes that are the biggest effect on lifespan.
A Review of the Effects of Nicotine on Schizophrenia and Antipsychotic Medications
Edward R. Lyon, M.S., Ed.D. Published online: October 01, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.50.10.1346 (full text available)
> OBJECTIVE: Research on the impact of nicotine on schizophrenia and antipsychotic medications was reviewed to determine ways to improve treatment planning for patients with schizophrenia who smoke and to evaluate smoking cessation programs for this population.
> METHODS: All major research databases were searched. The review focuses on reports published since 1990.
>RESULTS: Smoking improves processing of auditory stimuli (sensory gating) by patients with schizophrenia and may lessen negative symptoms by increasing dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal and frontal cortex. Use of traditional antipsychotics may result in patients' smoking more, whereas patients taking atypical antipsychotics may smoke less. Patients who smoke metabolize antipsychotics faster than nonsmoking patients. Smoking cessation programs for outpatients with schizophrenia report a success rate of about 12 percent after six months. No studies of cessation programs for chronically ill inpatients with schizophrenia have been published. Several hospitals have implemented smoking bans with equivocal results.
> CONCLUSIONS: Nicotine affects both schizophrenia and antipsychotic medications. Neurobiological and psychosocial factors reinforce the high use of nicotine by patients with schizophrenia
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3151730/
I'm not saying it's a good idea given the risk profile, but nicotine definitely has useful cognitive effects.
Also someone mentioned the antipsychotic treatment, irrelevant to most but pretty interesting: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smokin...
edit: good list of nootropic-style benefits of nicotine from gwern (https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine)
Improved reaction time, IQ test scores on the RAPM, pilots performanced enhanced, driving performance enhanced, overnight performance on memory and attention tasks improved, improved prospective memory, helps with ADHD, may help depression, found to help with mild cognitive imparement in the elderly
On the anecdata side, I have a few smoker friends who explained to me they only really feel the first cigarette in the morning. All the others cigarettes they smoke are due to habit/withdrawal.
In the end, there are a lot of stimulant drugs who do not have as much side effects as nicotine, especially when it comes in the form of tobacco, so it does not appear like smoking is a possible rational choice.
Reason 1. People enjoy smoking.
I'm not sure how people can manage to say stuff like absolutely nothing positive. It's like those lists of the effects of marijuana that list no positive effects whatsoever. Fairly obviously, no-one would smoke if it had no positive effects. There's a kind of moral crusade blindness common to phenomena like this. People can say evidently false things like 'There is absolutely nothing positive about cigarettes'. Because the end message is one they approve of, thinking is somehow blocked in the absolutist zeal.
I probably should have written "objectively positive". People's enjoyment is entirely subjective. What I enjoy and what you enjoy are probably different sets.
"What I enjoy and what you enjoy are probably different sets." Well, of course people each enjoy different things, but how that's relevant to your point I'm not sure.
I recently heard Doug Crockford saying a similar thing, that smoking has nothing positive about it, with evident pleasure, in his talk on programming, the brain and the gut; "Programming Style and Your Brain", I think it was. It was startling - an obviously intelligent guy suddenly saying something entirely baseless and evidently false.
edit: Downvoters, could you explain why? Thanks.
"What I enjoy and what you enjoy are probably different sets." is relevant insofar as pleasure is subjective, which is the opposite of objective.
When I wrote the original comment, I was not specific enough too include objective, which I should have.
Didn't downvote you by the way.
People smoke because it makes you feel good temporarily. This is a known effect that is experienced by a large majority. That’s not subjective any more than a release of endorphins during sex is subjective.
Probably no-one has ever thought that everyone enjoys exactly the same things. It's like if you're arguing with someone and the other person says "2+2=4" apparently to support their argument, it would just make you wonder what their argument is, that they bring in 2+2=4 as supporting evidence. It's still puzzling why bring that in, but it seems you have an unusual idea of subjective/objective, as the other commenter has pointed out. But I don't think that's the main issue here..
Trying to understand how people can say "there's nothing good/positive about smoking" :
It seems that - as very often happens in philosophy - there is an equivocation[0].
In one sense, the statement is false (the one I hear, and the guy who said it's a silly thing to say):
There's absolutely nothing positive about smoking (including the smoker's pleasure)
and the other is true but trivial (the one you said you meant when you clarified) :
There's absolutely nothing positive about smoking (not including the smoker's pleasure)
- apart from the smoker's enjoyment, there's nothing good about smoking. But (like ice cream) what are these other good things supposed to be? They are done for enjoyment.
You (and Crockford in that video) say it like it's a hard-hitting substantive thing to say, bemused at how it's not generally admitted. I think it seems so because of this equivocation.
[0] "an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses throughout an argument leading to a false conclusion" - wikip.
"There's absolutely nothing positive about smoking (including the smoker's pleasure)"
and replace it with
"There's absolutely nothing positive about smoking (not including the smoker's pleasure)"
If the statements were intended to stand side by side, that would be an equivocation. But they are not meant to stand side by side, nor would it make much sense to do so.
If you ever lived in an apartment with a neighbor who smokes, it turns from intense personal dislike to pure hate. I will never understand how people can smoke in their homes. It literally turns your house into an ashtray.
> I'm no fan of vaping, but as an intermediate step to the elimination of smoking, it is a necessary evil.
Unless it turns out to be more toxic.
The problem I see is that society seems to turning away from cigarettes and more towards weed and other type of obnoxious drug use.