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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

I love this. But how do you smoke cigars? Do you get a nicotine hit? Do you partially inhale? I find cigars mystifying.

You don't inhale into your lungs, you bring it into your mouth. Even seasoned cigar smokers, if they slightly inhale into their lungs, go into a coughing fit from doing to when they screw up. While I never smoked chemical cocktail cigarettes, people don't typically chain smoke cigars. Most people smoke one a day. However, that also depends, you have different lengths of cigar too. Some short, then you get the Churchill length (I'll let you figure out why). Also diameter of the cigars are different. Oh how full bodied the cigar is (typically these are the stronger cigars, lots of caveats to this, there's a cigar culture similar to wine culture, lots of nuance). The nicotine hit varies. Some smoke a few mellow cigars, which is like drinking Bud Lights, while for me, I like fuller bodied cigars. Half a full bodied can knock you like drinking 2 IPA beers. You can get tipsy from smoking a cigar.

Honestly, here's a pretty good video to teach you why people like cigars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79GnBpNuVBo

I watched it shortly after I got into cigar smoking and learned a lot from it.

I'll also say this, I have severe doubt that nicotine itself is highly addictive. In the last 3 years, I have a few 3-5 month time spans of not smoking cigars. No reason either. Just, I didn't feel like it. I've never had the feeling to, "I have to smoke today". I only do so as a relaxing time on the weekend, some parties, and celebrations.

Nicotine itself is highly addictive. How else would one explain the business model of JUUL and the other ecig companies and all the anecdotes of users who never smoked before they started vaping? Vaping is nicotine only with some supposedly safe fillers that also might cause popcorn lung.

Okay so. You can take the cigar smoking community and a majority don't have an addiction to smoking. They all have similar stories to me of just stopping without thinking about it for long stretches of time.

Then you have the cigarette and ecig community that are constantly sucking on those things every hour. Mostly children because pipes and cigars are more of a 30+ year old product. Maybe there's something to the age demographic.

Anyways, one is just pure tobacco with nicotine, the others are chemical cocktails. All nicotine studies I've seen come from cigarettes. Haven't looked at the ecig ones mostly because I never cared for that crap for the exact same reason as cigarettes, they're chemical cocktails.

Look, I'm just tired of people telling me that "You're addicted and just don't know it". Until this discussion, the last cigar I had was... August? Or it was late July. I don't remember. I know I had a few during July. Maybe one or two in August. I just haven't thought about it and I never had an urge. After 3 years of smoking, I might be on maybe cigar number 40 or 50. While there are some who just chain smoke everyday, a vast majority don't. My observations and experiences on cigar smoking don't add up (by a lot, not a little bit) to what you're saying and it's not like you hang out at cigar bars either, so you can only trust some other prude random schmuck or this crass internet random schmuck.

Again, I'm not advocating that cigar smoking is safe. You probably shouldn't do it. Hell, I'll tell you right now not to, just to make sure I never have to chat with someone like you at a cigar shop. I just don't think it's smart to apply ecig and cigarette studies to cigars when the ingredients don't match just because you have a knee jerk reaction from following what Nancy Reagan said back in the day.

I'm kinda in the same boat, except I smoke hookah occasionally. Like, once every four months or so. Guess I'm addicted?

The reason you aren't addicted is because you don't smoke often. Smoking cigs every day causes addiction, not the other way around.

Smoke a cigar every hour and you will be addicted too. I've gotten addicted separately on different forms and it is all the same. Fine in moderation (like a cig or a dip a day), but once you start ramping up beyond a certain baseline you will get a hell of a headache trying to claw it back. Feels exactly the same as a heavy caffeine addiction but it hits a half hour after the nicotine when its bad.

Nicotine itself isn't highly addictive; at least, not as mythologized in the anti-smoking campaigns. Its addictive potential is strongly dependent on factors like speed of uptake (itself a function of method as well as chemical formulation), and behavioral and social associations developed at the time of habituation. It's why cessation alternatives like nicotine gum have very poor track records, and why vaping has the potential (partly realized) to be both a considerable benefit to public health as well as considerable impediment.

> Half a full bodied can knock you like drinking 2 IPA beers. You can get tipsy from smoking a cigar.

Back when I used to smoke, I tried cigars a few times. They tasted good, but they'd make me sick even before I could finish one. I'd end up nauseous and laying on the floor trying to force myself not to throw up for about an hour. They would seriously fuck me up, and there's a reason I mostly just stuck to kreteks until I quit.

I've smoked a dozen or so cigars in my life, so I'm no expert, but you only draw cigar smoke into your mouth but you don't inhale. Think of it like using your diaphragm to inhale but in a kind of halting way combined with just dropping your jaw to increase your mouth's empty volume and pulling a slight negative pressure (maybe it's vaguely similar to playing a wind instrument?). You typically draw on a cigar very slowly anyways since they can burn unevenly if you draw fast or get them too hot. And yes, nicotine can be absorbed through the mouth and you definitely get a nicotine hit.

The same basic idea applies to tobacco pipes too.

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