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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

It’s a public health issue on the same order of magnitude as COVID-19, but happening every year: “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.” [0]

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

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Is there an active or other ingredient in tobacco that makes its smoke more harmful than cannabis? Or is it the method of ingestion?

They both put tar in your lungs. A tobacco smoker generally smokes far more cigarettes than a cannabis smoker. Per-breath, cannabis seems to put more tar in your lungs, since it's generally unfiltered. But a tobacco smoker takes many more breaths of smoke.

Some information here:

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...

As far as I can tell, vaping is far, far safer than inhaling smoke, for both tobacco and cannabis. The healthiest strategy is to avoid all of these things of course.

Nicotine is potentially harmful in a few ways but mostly it's the constituents of tobacco smoke, particularly nitrosamines: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121116-can-we-ever-have....

> Nicotine is potentially harmful in a few ways

Not least of which is it's incredibly addictive. Meaning that tobacco smokers often smoke a lot.

True, but of itself that's not necessarily a health problem. I was talking about the limited evidence that it can harden your arterial walls and such.

Nicotine is a harmless nootropic on the level of caffeine, it's inhaling combustion products that is the big problem.

Yes. This is a common misconception. It’s not that inhaling any kind of smoke is inherently dangerous. It’s specifically the oxidative damage that tobacco causes that makes it so uniquely deleterious. Reactive oxygen species are no joke.

By contrast cannabis is a natural anti-oxidant. Smoking cannabis might be correlated with more bronchitis but none of the cancer, heart disease, [insert every other tobacco harm]. BTW I seem to recall particle size is different between tobacco and cannabis smoke but I think the oxidative damage is the main reason

Now do obesity.

But it's not. Smoking isn't contagious.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke.

Even if I take those numbers at face value, it's disengenuous to mix in those from 1964 and up until we banned public smoking nearly everywhere you can imagine. The last place you can smoke freely is your home, and this doesn't address that.

Honestly the secondhand smoke research is very sketchy. Actually anything that becomes a public health issue ends up getting distorted by the public health establishment. Case in point: flu vaccines. They’re so ineffective that no rational person would ever waste time taking them, yet many of us do: https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ... (note: the “no rational person” is slight hyperbole)

The better argument is that the actual social behavior of smoking is contagious, as any social behavior is.

The victims of secondhand smoke aren't someone standing on the street next to a smoker but people (and pets) who grow up in a household with smokers. Whether or not the numbers are what they are claimed to be it's hard to argue against the reality that thousands of children are subjected to the very real harms of secondhand smoke their entire childhood with no recourse, especially when they are most vulnerable.

I don't say this to say we should ban tobacco because "think of the children" but I genuinely think people seriously overlook this aspect. Someone smoking near you as an adult might be obnoxious but children in smoking households suffer and develop lifelong health problems for a vice that is entirely out of their control that many people don't even really see as a problem or think about.

Ha, I hear this argument all the time and it’s actually completely wrong. All social behaviors are contagious. They do spread exponentially. Especially drug consumption / smoking.

Note: it’s not relevant but to be clear I oppose all drug bans (incl tobacco) and all the COVID restrictions. So don’t interpret my pointing out that social behaviors are contagious to be justifying the menthol ban.

This misses the point of what makes a contagion so bad. An outbreak of a contagious disease is bad because victims do not (usually) consent to them and often has limited or no means of protecting themselves against infection. A nicotine addiction is nothing like that.

That's true, but covid doesn't get you chemically addicted, nor does it have a bunch of companies attempting to coerce you into continuing to have it.

It sort of is actually.

If someone near you is smoking, so are you.

If someone near you is smoking, when you go home you aren't at risk of an ER visit in the next week. If someone near you has Covid, you are.

Is it, though?

COVID-19 is scary because you can't reasonably eliminate your risk of contracting it without significant mental, social, and economic sacrifice. But I'm not worried about getting lung cancer because I just don't smoke. You can't just accidentally give lung cancer or a nicotine addiction to someone at a social gathering.

It's impossible to smoke in the United States without knowing the addictive and carcinogenic nature of it. The warnings are plastered all over the ads, the counter, and the product itself. If you know all that and still choose to smoke, that's on you. People take risks with their lives for things that make them happy all the time. As long as you know the risks up front and you aren't bothering me with it, why should I care?

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