Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

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Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted and almost all do so enough to substantially effect their health and longevity whether they know it or not. Most of the people who consume alcohol do so casually and not to excess.

Essentially the chance of dying in a given year due to alcohol if this were anything like a random chance is around 1 in 2000 whereas the chance of dying from smoking is around 1 in 77.

This is something like the difference in danger in riding a motorcycle 100 miles and base jumping.

Of course its not random at all whereas taking up smoking is extremely likely to result in becoming a life long smoker and suffering the average ill effects its perfectly possible for most people to enjoy a sane amount of alcohol infrequently.

Consumption of intoxicants of some variety seems to have been a feature of humanity for the entirety of human history. The expulsion of smoker from reasonable things to be in human society has only happened after we realized its predictable massive effect on human health. There just will never be the same impetus with alcohol.

>Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted and almost all do so enough to substantially effect their health and longevity whether they know it or not.

This sounds right enough, but can you cite your sources for it?

I don't think that really needs a cite in 2021 but let me give it a go

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180109214939.h...

> At least 61 per cent of people who try their first cigarette become, at least temporarily, daily smokers, suggests an analysis of survey data by Queen Mary University of London.

This is actually stronger than the original statement. A substantial minority who even try smoking become smokers.I think it ought to be considered a given that people who smoke are physiologically addicted to nicotine. Having many relatives who smoke currently or have in the past. Smoking in America has been so pervasive that most of us likely have direct knowledge of smoking by either smoking having family members who smoke.

When you stated 'virtually everyone', I assumed >90%. So no, 60% is not that. It is still a terrifyingly high percentage nonetheless.

To clarify imagine a funnel. In step one 61% who try smoking become daily smokers. In step two some percentage n of those who become daily smokers become addicted to smoking.

Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted is a statement about step two and asserting that n is somewhere near 100% based on knowing a plethora of smokers, hearing about how smoking effected them, and watching their struggles to quit and reading about the physiological effects of smoking. It isn't a very scientific analysis and I'm open to more clear numbers if you have them.

61% seems strange to me. It's anecdotal but almost (more than 95%) all my friends in university tried at least once, and yet only roughly 15% became smokers. Trying a cigarette once is something that is very very common, at least in France.

In 2014 34% of the french smoked I think it is down to around 27% but e-cigarette use is up so part of the decline might be down to that.

Going to the other end percentage who have tried smoking. This is harder to pin down because tobacco use by youth is illegal and its hard to ask kids to be honest about breaking the law even when its supposed to be anonymous. It looks like between 20%-30% self report trying tobacco in school here and in France although I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this was substantially wrong. Not as wrong as 95% is though.

I suspect you like most people don't really closely associate with enough people from your school days to be called a useful sample, you don't actually know how many of them tried nicotine products, and you don't know how many of them ultimately spent some of their life smoking. What you have tried to do is make a rough estimate of how many people you know and tried to bring to mind the ones you had seen smoking.

It's not shocking that a large portion of people that try a very addictive and at one time socially acceptable drug have gone on to become addicted.

Not OP, but this is one study I have came across, which postulates that cigarette addiction is quick to develop, and doesn't take years of smoking to develop. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444329/

From the abstract:

  New research has overturned the dogma that cigarette 
  addiction takes years to develop. Studies of adolescent 
  smokers show that symptoms of addiction, such as 
  withdrawal, craving for cigarettes and failed attempts at 
  quitting, can appear within the first weeks of smoking. 
  To account for these findings, scientists have developed 
  a new theory positing that the brain quickly develops 
  adaptations that counter the effects of nicotine. These 
  adaptations lead to withdrawal symptoms when the effects 
  of nicotine wear off. The results highlight the 
  importance of boosting government funding for antismoking 
  campaigns, particularly those aimed at youngsters.

The author of the paper (Joseph R.DiFranza, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, USA.) wrote in May-2008 issue of Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2008/05-01/ outlining his research findings. The article Hooked from the first cigarette in this issue isn't available online, but if you are subscriber of SciAm checkout this issue.

The question is... what is a sane amount of alcohol? It’s surprisingly carcinogenic. It’s just the alcohol industry, much like the tobacco industry of yesteryear, has successfully suppressed this info.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer

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