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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Smoking is addiction that is demonstrably bad for your health and has no benefits.

I grew up in an environment where smoking was encouraged and I can understand a person that conforms to their buddies. I have personally never tasted it but when I was teen virtually everybody smoked and it took a lot of willpower to withstand the pressure.

I think these days, in western world, except for schools, low income neighborhoods and low income jobs to be smoking means you have not enough willpower to end it. I would say most middle class people and office workers do not encourage smoking or will actively discourage it and smoking is mostly treated as a disease.

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No benefits?

> The heaviest smokers, with everything else being equal, had about half the number of parasitic eggs in their stool, compared to everyone else

> Smoking kills. But if you’re a bird and if you want to kill parasites, that can be a good thing. City birds have taken to stuffing their nests with cigarette butts to poison potential parasites.

> 8 intestinal parasite species have been recovered singly or in combinations from 146 (61.8 %) samples. The prevalence in prison population (88/121 = 72.7%) was significantly higher than that in tobacco farm (58/115 = 50.4%).

(from https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/did-tobacco-b..., which is basically just a collection of these quotes)

The reason smoking gives you a lower parasite load is surprisingly intuitive: parasites often move through the body by using the circulatory system, which is, after all, a transportation network designed to reach every part of the body.

The circulatory system, for business logic reasons, is a star topology which connects every point to every other point through a single central hub, the lungs.

As far as I can tell, the references you gave do not support your implication that there are benefits to nicotine smoking.

"The heaviest smokers" refers to THC smokers, not nicotine, which is the topic at hand. It may be that nicotine smoking does the same, but your reference does not show that that has been demonstrated outside of a Petri dish.

The "no benefits" refers to human health, not birds. Even with humans, smoking benefits the wealth of the cigarette manufacturer, which may lead to better health. But that also was not the point.

The prison/tobacco leaf development farm comparison cannot be used to judge the effect of nicotine smoking on one's health. For one, the paper does not mention which population smoked more, nor does it report nicotine levels in the stool samples. For all we know, the prison population may smoke 4x more than the farm workers. Or 1/4th as much.

The "In vitro anthelmintic effect of Tobacco" paper described in your link refers to study in a Petri dish of aqueous and alcoholic extracts of tobacco. It describes how "Dried leaves, stalks and the whole herb of tobacco are widely used as an anti inflammatory, antirheumatic and anthelmintic agent" and cites other papers which use nicotine extracts. This paper therefore cannot be used to conclude there is a beneficial in vivo effect of smoking tobacco.

Lastly, while the blood does indeed go through the lungs, it is wrong to say "a single central hub", as the heart is also a central hub.

- They may not prove that there are benefits to smoking tobacco, but they certainly do support the idea.

- The claim is that smoking cigarettes has benefits, not that smoking nicotine does.

- The idea of calling the lungs a single central hub is, as you acknowledge, that in order to move through the circulatory system it is necessary to pass through the lungs. There is no alternative route which offers the chance to bypass the lungs. If the heart were also a central hub, it would be possible for blood to move from an extremity to the heart and back out to another extremity without passing through the lungs, but of course in reality it isn't. Drawing the blood flow network, if you wanted to distinguish the heart from the lungs, you'd need to place the lungs node between a node for the right heart and another node for the left heart.

Those papers neither support nor reject the idea. At best it is "suggestive."

As I pointed out, with the prisoner/tobacco farmer case you must know the rate of smoking in both populations in order to make any sort of preliminary statement, because 4x vs. 1/4x gives you totally different interpretation, yes? But that information wasn't given. Therefore you cannot draw a conclusion either way from that study.

There may be other reasons for a difference between inhaled vs. ingested nicotine.

It may be that nicotine, when processed by stomach acid, results in a compound which causes the effects seen, and that inhalation does not produce the same results.

Or, since we are talking about parasites in the digestive system, it may be that the nicotine must reach the parasites directly. As you point out, the nicotine which goes through the lungs can enter the bloodstream directly. However, does that nicotine then get released to where the parasites are? The intestines usually work the other way.

I could probably come up with a few more differences if I thought about it. That's why those paper do not support the conjecture.

You wrote "The claim is that smoking cigarettes has benefits, not that smoking nicotine does". However, 1) this post is specifically about tobacco cigarette butts ("Those discarded filters usually contain synthetic fibers and hundreds of chemicals used to treat tobacco"), 2) this thread of the post seems specifically directed to tobacco smokers (woodruffw asked "smokers on HN" why so many smokers "flick their cigarettes into gutters and on streets" - observed events are much more due to tobacco smokers), and 3) you replied to lmilcin, who wrote "Smoking is addiction that is demonstrably bad for your health and has no benefits. ... I grew up in an environment where smoking was encouraged ... when I was teen virtually everybody smoked ...".

It is clear that lmilcin specifically means tobacco smoking. There are very few places/cultures in the "western world" (quoting lmilcim) where 'virtually everybody' smokes marijuana, clove cigarettes, or other herbal cigarettes. A quick check of lmilcin's history finds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18440363 saying "I am Pole", so lmilcin is almost certainly talking about Poland. Therefore, it's definitely a comment about tobacco cigarette smoking.

If you really believed the thread was about any sort of smoking, then you could have simply pointed out that some herbal cigarettes are not addictive as your counter-example.

I'm contrasting smoking cigarettes with vaping. I think those are significantly different things, and that it's very possible that the pure nicotine exposure you'd get from vaping does not contribute as much antiparasitic effect as you'd get from smoking a tobacco cigarette.

If you don't believe that the separate showings that

- smoking marijuana lowers parasite load

- workers on a tobacco plantation have lower parasite loads than prisoners

- tobacco has strong antiparasitic effects

do not constitute support for the idea that smoking tobacco lowers parasite load, then all I can say is that you're being intentionally obtuse. They are strong evidence that (1) Tobacco has antiparasitic effects (this is just the third result), and (2) smoking is an effective delivery method for antiparasitic treatments. That's what support looks like.

They don't conclusively establish that smoking is an effective delivery method for the antiparasitic effect of tobacco in specific. But that's a much stronger showing than "support" requires.

"I'm contrasting smoking cigarettes with vaping"

How am I supposed to know that? Vaping wasn't brought up on any of the g'parents of this thread, and I don't see the relevance. Nor did the papers you referenced discuss vaping.

"smoking marijuana lowers parasite load" - I pointed out that the person you were responding to (lmilcin) was specifically talking about smoking tobacco. I wrote that the study "refers to THC smokers, not nicotine, which is the topic at hand".

If we broaden the topic to THC then I am fully in agreement with the statement that there are benefits to smoking marijuana. However, as the source NPR article says: "Of course, this result is a simple correlation. Hagen doesn't know if the THC in the men's system is actually keeping the parasitic worms at bay. And taking a few pills is a much easier way to get rid of intestinal worms." If the research scientist on the project doesn't know if it's true, why do you think it's true?

I am in agreement with the statement "workers on a tobacco plantation have lower parasite loads than prisoners". But lmilcin's posting was specifically about the effect of smoking. What if none of the tobacco farm workers smoked, while 100% of the prisoners smoked? Wouldn't that show that tobacco smoking does not have a beneficial effect on intestinal parasites? So you tell me, what percentage of each population smoked?

I am in agreement with the statement "tobacco has ... antiparasitic effects". However, the papers you indirectly referenced specifically concerned ingesting liquid solutions of tobacco. They did not mention smoking. As I pointed out, there are several mechanisms where ingestion might work while inhaling does not. Therefore those papers cannot be used to contradict the assertion that tobacco smoking has no health benefits.

You write "smoking is an effective delivery method for antiparasitic treatments".

Which of the papers described smoking as an effective delivery method for antiparasitic treatments? I have read the original publications and not found the conclusion you describe, nor do they support evolutionistx's hypothesis.

Since it's so clear to you, could you quote the relevant text from those publications which supports your conclusion?

If smoking marijuana lowers parasite load, then smoking is an effective delivery method for the antiparasitic effect of smoking marijuana. You typed it yourself in this very comment.

Yes, and if smoking cured cancer then smoking would be an effective way of curing cancer.

Problem is, you need to demonstrate that your claim is true, otherwise you're begging the question.

I agree that 1) if you widen the topic beyond the original claim, which was specifically about tobacco smoking, and 2) if you assume the correlation implies causation, then sure, you're right.

Except as I've now pointed out several times:

1) the comment you replied to was specifically about tobacco smoking, and trivially disproved if you (mistakenly) expand it to all types of smoking; and

2) neither the lead scientist quoted in the NPR piece nor the actual paper make the claim that smoking marijuana lowers parasite load, only that there is a correlation. Again, quoting the NPR piece, the lead scientist "doesn't know if the THC in the men's system is actually keeping the parasitic worms at bay".

Therefore, how do you know that smoking marijuana lowers parasite load? Please quote the relevant study.

Is this really the hill you want to die on?

there are tons of benefits which is why people do it

Such as?

Probably that it feels good. Same reason people do anything addictive.

Doesn't it feel good in a similar way that scratching an itch does in that its more a temporary relief from suffering instead of feeling good all the time?

A social network with other smokers in proximity. Regular breaks from work that they don't forget to make. Regular time outside of a sealed office space..

There are definite short term advantages to smokers. There (_)used to be similar short term advantages for those who drank during work hours when it was socially acceptable.

(_ Used to might be wrong.. Startups with designated drinking times that seem to be mandatory are annoying but not irrational given their short term interests.)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm lucky that at my current job none of us smoke and still regularly take quick walks outside of the office. I guess it helps that every room has a door that goes directly outside.

Nicotine has stimulant & nootropic effects:

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#benefits

Tobacco also naturally contains, in addition to the nicotine, other compounds that act like MAOIs - ie, as antidepressants:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16859748

I hear death has some great benefits too, everyone's doing it.

You probably didn't mean to be correct, but it happened anyway. A virus is immortal. The macro-organisms we're all familiar with will age and die even under ideal circumstances; there is no fundamental reason for this to be necessary. But we evolved to do it because it offered advantages over the more traditional ageless immortality.

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted because there are very clearly benefits to smoking in the form of stimulation and relaxation. Many people get started with smoking because it provides these benefits. People shouldn't do it because the overall risk profile is highly negative given the health impacts, but to say there are no benefits frames the problem completely incorrectly.

I'm one of the sorta-fortunate (I guess) ones who almost never got any pleasure out of cigarettes. Something about my physical composition doesn't jibe well with them. A handful of times when the air was super humid, I was intoxicated in some way and/or my body was in a certain equilibrium, I experienced the enjoyment, but the rest of the time (~95%) they made me feel worse. I was still stupid enough to keep doing it for social reasons way longer than I should have.

My small experiments with cannabis have made me wonder how tobacco possibly could have ever become more popular, the former's effects are much more noticeable with a vastly smaller amount of smoke and can be quite pleasant.

Tobacco had a longstanding religious significance here in North America, that's how I was first introduced to it and I still appreciate it as part of sweat lodges or similar events. It makes more sense to me viewed in that light, a good analogy might be the bread and wine of a catholic mass.

Germany is definitely not western world then. 50% of adults can't say no to a cigarette.

Even in Germany, only 24.5% of adults smoke (old data from 2013, nowadays probably a lot less).

"Microcensus"... Other sources state >50% smokers (not just heavy ones)

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